Instruct the pupil to organize a small, select number of blocks into a group.
Example: Place three blocks in a group.
Tell the student to make a small, select number of similar groups.
Example: Make four more groups of three, for a total of five groups of three.
Ask the pupil to count how many groups there are and tell you what the answer is. In this example, the answer is five. Ask the student how many blocks are in each group In this example the answer is three.
Explain to the pupil that another way of saying X groups of Y is X times Y, as in XY number of times.
Ask the pupil to solve the multiplication problem by counting the total number of blocks. Then tell you what the answer is. In this example the answer is 15.
Explain to the pupil that multiplication is about adding together equal groups. And that solving a multiplication problem involves figuring out what the total is when the number that makes up the group is added to itself a certain number of times.
Repeat Steps 1 through 6, but this time swap the number of blocks that had been in each group with the number of groups.
Example: Make three groups of five.
This reversal is used to demonstrate how X times Y equals the same amount as Y times X.