If your students are competitive or full of energy, consider using competitive activities to teach multiplication and division. Multiplication Baseball, a game from Pro Teacher, gets students moving around the classroom. Ask the students who is up to bat to solve a multiplication problem. Time his response. Depending on how fast his response is, allow him to move to first second or third base. If he gets the problem wrong, he gets a strike. After three strikes, he's out.
Creative activities provide excellent opportunities to teach students who are visual leaners. If students have already been introduced to the concepts of multiplying and dividing integers, ask them to create a poster board to explain the concepts to their peers. Crafts can also be used to introduce the topic of multiplication and division to students. Divide 100 pieces of yarn among students and ask them what happens to the rest of the yard, noting that the rest of the yarn is a remainder.
Food-related activities get kids excited about learning and offer a fun way to reward students for learning how to multiply and divide integers. Bring in a cake and divide the cake among the students, asking students what happens when the one cake is divided by the number of students in the class. You could also ask students to bring in a bag of candy from home. Each student could then add their candy to the entire classroom's pile of candy. Discuss how this represents the multiplication of integers.
Group activities should be used in the mathematics classroom to help students get to know one another, learn about math from different people's perspectives and teach their peers about what they know about the subject. Divide students up into small groups and divide slips of paper among them. This will demonstrate to the students how, if you divide a big number by a certain number of students, the bigger number becomes smaller. You can also have students cut little squares out a piece of colored paper and add one piece to the pile at the same time as their peers to represent multiplication.