Factors and Multiples
Strand: Number
Outcome: 3
Step 3: Plan for Instruction
Guiding Questions
- What learning opportunities and experiences should I provide to promote learning of the outcomes and permit students to demonstrate their learning?
- What teaching strategies and resources should I use?
- How will I meet the diverse learning needs of my students?
A. Assessing Prior Knowledge and Skills
Before introducing new material, consider ways to assess and build on students' knowledge and skills related to counting.
Ways to Assess and Build on Prior Knowledge and Skills 
B. Choosing Instructional Strategies
Consider the following instructional strategies for teaching factors, multiples, primes and composites.
- Introduce and reinforce the concepts by using problem-solving contexts.
- Provide students with a variety of problems that apply the concepts of multiples and factors. Encourage them to solve the problems in different ways and explain the process. Also, provide time for students to share their solutions with others. Stimulate class discussion to evaluate critically the various procedures. Emphasize understanding, flexibility and efficiency when students select problem-solving strategies.
- Connect the new concepts to prior knowledge such as odd and even numbers, skip counting, multiplication and division number facts, area of rectangles and volume of rectangular prisms.
- Integrate patterns as students explore the concepts.
- "Create a classroom environment that encourages student exploration, questioning, verification and sense making" (NCTM 1991, p. 5).
- Provide opportunities for students to explore the relationships among factors, multiples, primes and composites.
- Encourage students to communicate their thinking by connecting manipulatives, diagrams and symbols to illustrate the concepts.
- Provide a variety of ways to illustrate the concepts.
- Encourage students to make and critique generalizations related to the concepts.
- Provide extensions that build on the concepts. Examples may include least common multiple and greatest common factor.
C. Choosing Learning Activities
The following learning activities are examples
that could be used to develop student understanding
of the concepts identified in Step 1.
Sample Activities:
Grade 6
