Lately, Rūma Tōtara have been learning about multiplication. We decided to create an array city to help us with our learning.

We realised that when we multiplied two numbers together we usually got a much bigger answer than when we added two numbers together. To help us get used to thinking about multiplication (or times-ing, as we like to call it) as making 'groups of' or 'lots of' we made a city of window-filled skyscrapers. The number of rows and number of columns that each skyscraper had represented the two numbers that we were multiplying. We then had to find the total by counting all the windows, or skip counting if we were really clever. We tried it with the peg boards  too, and practised writing the equation that matched what we had created.