Using Bar Models To Solve Multiplication Problems

Hi, I'm Ben. In this video, we're going to be looking at solving a simple multiplication word problem using the bar model. Here's the question. There are six year groups at Golden Bridge Primary School. Each year group in the school has 90 pupils in it. How many pupils are there altogether? So it's really important to GAMLAP with all word problems that the children look at the question and interrogate the key data. So we've got six year groups each with 90 pupils. So a bar model would work really well here so we can draw the bar. Again, it's important that we keep each section of the bar, each part fairly proportional, so the children can see the relationship there. And we know that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, there are six parts to the whole and each part has 90 children in it. And again, writing the numbers there makes it really clear for the children and just helps them see the procedures that they've got to get through. So there we can see that we've got to combine all of these together and the children can do that through repeated addition, or they may be able to see that they can multiply 96 times, or they may do 6 times 9 to get 54, then multiply it by 10 and we will write this out. So 90 times 6 equals 540, and that's how we can use the bar method to solve a simple multiplication word problem.