GCF Word Problems

It has been such a while since I've made a post! My nephews were victims of a major car accident days ago and are currently recovering.  I am also sick with the flu and wasn't able to teach yesterday.

We've been going over GCF word problems in class! Today I had students look at the following task from Illustrative Mathematics: Bake Sale Task


The idea is for students to gain the understanding that the cookies can be arranged into different numbers of bags based on the factors of the total number of cookies. Example:

48 Chocolate Chip Cookies can be arranged in the following ways:

 

Later students develop an understanding that if they are to arrange the vanilla wafers and the chocolate chip cookies into bags with the same amount of cookies in each bag and none left over, that the only way to do so would be by using common factors of 48 and 64.

Classwork - Tape Diagrams and Equivalent Ratios

Last week we used tape diagrams to learn about equivalent ratios and solve word problems. Tape diagrams are a great way to visualize ratio relationships. Below is an example of how we can use a tape diagram to represent and solve a problem.

Example: The ratio of the number of shoes Mr. E has to the number of sneakers Mr. E has is 5:2

If Mr. E has 25 shoes, how many sneakers does he have?

The five tapes represent the number of shoes Mr. E has. If we divide (25 ÷ 5)  then we know that each tape represents 5 shoes.

Now we can find out the number of sneakers Mr. E has, which is 10. Mr. E has 10 sneakers.