Cupcake Liner Multiplication

My Little Cheese is a very visual learner.  She needs to be able to see how math works more than just on a piece of paper.  So, I really have to search my brain sometimes to come up with visual teaching aids.  Sometimes things are put off for several weeks as I try to come up with that example.  Now, I don't mean that we don't do math during this time, we just move on to something that is easy to understand or for which visual aids come alot easier.

Tackling Multiplication.  Yeah.  I have dreaded this one.  But it finally came to me in a moment of brilliance as I was setting up a cupcake liner game for my little Manny.  Here is an example for the 5's.

For this visual, I told little cheese that the first number in the math problem was for the number of sets (each liner represents a set) and the second number represents how many are in each set.  I pre-cut strips of paper that would show how many were to be in each set and the answer.

Then she took pom-poms and made the problem correct.  5 sets with 1 in each set equals 5.

5 sets with 2 in each set equals 10...and so on.

I am linking this to Works For Me Wednesday