Teach multiplication with ease this school year with free printable multiplication worksheets, digital activities, games and more to help students understand how to multiply numbers and apply multiplication strategies to math problems. This teaching resource collection was created by the teachers on the Teach Starter team for elementary teachers, and each curriculum-aligned resource has been carefully reviewed and curated to ensure it's ready to use with your students! Explore multiplication charts and tables, methods for explaining the associative and commutative properties and more, plus find differentiated resources to help you meet each student's needs!

Want to learn more about multiplication? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Is Multiplication? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Introducing multiplication to your class? Let's get started with a definition of this math operation that's easy for them to understand. Multiplication is the process of adding a number to itself many times. It's a simple way to figure out how much you'll have when you add the same number again and again. Let's look at an example. Pretend you have 3 apples, and you want to multiply them by 4. If you did this, you would end up with 12 apples because you added 3 apples to itself four times (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 12).

Multiplication Terms

Launching into multiplication in your math class involves plenty of new vocabulary words for your students to learn! Here are some of the terms you will want to start off with.

Product

The product of a multiplication problem is the result of multiplying two or more numbers together. It's basically the answer to your math problem!

Partial Product

If the product is the answer, what's a partial product? This is the name of each product when you break apart the factors and multiply the parts in a multi-digit number. While there are many ways to solve multiplication problems with partial products, the box method is a common strategy to help students break apart each factor before multiplying.

Factor

In multiplication, the factor is the number that is being multiplied by another number to get a product. For example, in the problem 3 x 4 = 12, the numbers 3 and 4 are factors, and the product is 12.

Multiplication Table

Sometimes called a times table, a multiplication table that shows the products of all the possible combinations of two numbers.

What Is the Associative Property of Multiplication?

The associative property of multiplication means we can change the grouping of the factors being multiplied, and it won't change the product. For example:

(2 x 3) x 4 = 2 x (3 x 4) = 24

No matter how we group the factors being multiplied, the product will always be the same!

A cartoon version of the multiplication symbol

What Is the Commutative Property of Multiplication?

The commutative property of multiplication means we can change the order of the multiplied factors without changing the product. For example:

3 x 4 = 4 x 3 = 12

This means we can multiply the factors in any order we like and still get the same result!

What Is the Distributive Property of Multiplication?

Another property of multiplication students learn in elementary school is distributive. This means we can distribute a factor across the sum or difference of two other factors. This property is handy when we want to break down a more complicated multiplication problem. Let's look at an example:

4 x (3 + 2)

We can use the Distributive Property to rewrite this expression as:

(4 x 3) + (4 x 2)

Now we can simplify each of these products separately:

12 + 8 = 20

Using the distributive property, we can figure out that the original problem 4 x (3 + 2) — is equivalent to 20.

What Is the Identity Property of Multiplication?

The identity property of multiplication lets you simplify multiplication problems involving the number 1. When we multiply any number by 1, the product is the same as the original number! Let's say we have the problem 5 x 1. When we apply the identity property, we know that the product of 5 and 1 is 5 itself, since 1 is the multiplicative identity!

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