Third graders at Arbor Station Elementary School recently became “multiplication surgeons” while learning how breaking apart multiplication problems can make them easier to solve.

Dressed as surgeons, students connected performing a complex procedure to solving a challenging math problem, said third-grade teacher Jameria Scales.

“Just as surgeons carefully break a procedure into smaller steps, students used the distributive property to break apart multiplication problems into smaller, more manageable parts,” she said.

Using arrays, students decomposed factors, solved each smaller multiplication problem and then combined the products to find the total.

The hands-on lesson deepened students’ understanding of the distributive property and showed them that breaking a complex task into smaller parts can make problem-solving more efficient, Scales said.