Story: Inspired by the way Ben, a character from their read aloud book Wonderstruck, relied upon his vision,
students in this classroom are asked to notice shapes around the room. They are specifically challenged to find and
measure rectangles. Students can use a ruler to measure the rectangles in centimeters or inches and are asked to
document the measurements and figure out the area of each rectangle they find. This vitamin is one of several during
the recent weeks that have focused on the concepts of area, perimeter, building arrays and learning the process for
the double/triple digit multiplication algorithm.
All Math Vitamins require students to build, draw and record their
work as well as share their thoughts with peers and teachers. The strong UCDS math community within each classroom is
developed through the process of peer and teacher conversations that focus on exciting mathematical tasks and engaging
ideas about the various approaches to solve them.
Suggested manipulatives:
For learning to build rectangular arrays, students can begin by using Unifix cubes,
centimeter cubes or
multilinks. As student skills develop, move to base ten blocks for building double-digit arrays.
Prep time: Adapting the vitamin wording to fit your specific story, putting manipulatives out in the room,
and copying the vitamin documentation forms will take about 15-20 minutes. Set up is always more fun and shorter on
time if you do this activity with a colleague.
Classroom time: Asking children to “do their best work” for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will
need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another
task available (writing, spelling, activity centers etc.) for those students who finish work prior to their peers.
For this project allow 45-60 minutes for students to work through all the steps.
How to individualize/stretch: When working with arrays, start discovering area and perimeter by having students
make all the array configurations they can discover for the numbers 1-36. This project also highlights prime and square numbers
as well. Move onto building larger two digit arrays and eventually this will lead to learning the algorithm for the multiplication.

