Teaching Prime Numbers & Prime Factorization - A Short Movie

The slide show I used to introduce the students to the activity-

The worksheet students were filling out-

The Prime Number Song I wrote-

Music by Podington Bear
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I’m Thom Gibson.

🍎 I teach middle school math, science, and robotics.

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Find me on social media :)

[No-iypo]

Thanks for the activity review! I’m going to try this tomorrow with my 6th graders!

[jennachapman]

I love this activity. I found your format really helpful, You explained the activity, tried it in the classroom and reflected on how it could've been better. This will help me so much when I try it in my classroom. Thanks!

[scottkirkland]

Mate, it looks brilliant. But I love the way you reflect on what you are doing as well as their learning.

[JoCulf]

thanks for sharing. great to see the planning, delivery and reflective process.

[mansuvanditha]

Hey Thom .. I really loved the idea of urs.. children often find it difficult to visualise prime numbers .. u made it easier ..m gonna try this in my session as well ..thank u ..loads of love frm India, 🙂

[cazadorau]

A nice idea, but the colours add an unnecessary complication and the approach used the idea of connecting the blocks to represent multiplication, which the students logically misunderstood as addition.
A more suitable representation may be to build arrays (grids, rectangles) made out of the blocks. This would allow you to build a 2x3 or 3x2 array for 6, but every prime number would be a 1x(prime number) array.
For large composite numbers the sides of the arrays become larger factors and the array can be broken down into smaller arrays until they are all primes. However, in the end you still have to keep track of how many of each prime you have.
What do you think?

[shikhapathak]

As me as a student that helped me alot!! Thanks

[samvedansandhu]

I was having a hard time figuring out how to teach this to them. You made my life so much easier. Thank you for the excellent ideas. I like it when teachers are open to sharing their ideas with other teachers. Do you have any other lessons that I can look at for the future? Another question that I have is what does swbat mean?

[michaelaltman]

For your WKST "Build the number 36. How many ways can this be done? are you looking for 3x3x4 as one way and 3x4x3 as another way or do you consider there only being one way because your students realize that multiplication is commutative.

[MathMathX]

wonderful idea.
thanks for sharing...

[susantulett]

Nice ideas would love to see the blocks stay in the second and any further lessons.

[novaodos]

I first thought of using "MagicaVoxel" but "Goxel" is available for free in any browser, and it can even be downloaded for Win and Mac. For students having iPhones I found that "Particubes" works just fine.
I made my students build up to prime number 29 (Third of Secondary, definitely not 6th graders) and you we're right addition, instead of multiplication, was actually a very common mistake.
Once again, thanks for sharing and I hope you're doing fine.

[johnyoung]

loved the way you made it visual\ tactile that will help all of there memory, and being dislexsik i know it would have very much help me lern it cool cool pip pip

[danametz]

Would you be willing to share the recording sheet that your students used for this activity?