Trouble with Multiplication?

As a teacher of Mathematics in elementary, secondary and high school, I have always enjoyed teaching computations to children. I have experienced that not only the children in the schools are keen on doing computations accurately, but collegians also are enthusiastic about improving their computational skills, as sharpening computational skills is an important aspect of mathematics.

To give the children help in computation, I have studied homework of a large number of children and class-work in detail. This has helped me in understanding the types of mistakes that generally gives poor grades. Keeping these mistakes in mind, I tried to find ways to overcome the mistakes. Sometimes I got readymade solutions. However, on many occasions I had to use trial-and-error approach as I was dealing with a different lot of students. Sometimes discussions with fellow-teachers gave some leads to the solutions. Some of these teachers had been using some of their innovative methods successfully developed intuitively over the years. As these solutions had not been documented many were lost. Now I have realized that such innovations should be shared and made available to teachers, children as well as parents in larger interest.

One such idea is presented here.

While teaching multiplication of numbers with more than one digit, to eight- to ten-years old children, I found that although some children were comfortable with the process of “carrying” in addition, they had difficulty in managing “carrying” in multiplication. With such children I found the following method of multiplication very useful.

The multiplication 34 x 42 can be completed in the following way:

Therefore 34 x 42 = 1428

Since every product is written in full, children find this method easy. This is actually the Hindu System1 of writing the multiplication.

See how 428 x 52 can be done.

Thus, 428 x 52 = 22256

I am anxious to know how useful you find this idea. I will be very happy to receive your ideas too. Till then Bye!

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