MA, Stanford University
Teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area
Alissa is currently a teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brightstorm users love her clear, concise explanations of tough concepts
If you have a problem like 16 x 63 - 16 x 53, you could get a calculator and find two ugly products and subtract them, OR you could use the distributive property to rewrite the problem as 16 ( 63-53.) You can easily do 63-53 in your head and get 10, and then multiply 10 times 16. This is using the distributive property to simplify our calculations with numbers. This is also an introduction to what we call factoring, where we take a sum or difference and re-write it as a multiplication problem.
Transcript Coming Soon!
