Andrea Urmston’s fourth grade class at CES is exploring factors and products in math.

 

Students worked with a partner to make tile arrays, trying to determine whether numbers are prime or composite.

 

 

Prime numbers are numbers that have only two factors: one and themselves. Numbers with more than two factors are composite numbers. For example, the first five prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. They can only be divided by themselves and the number one. Composite numbers have more than two factors.

 

The number one is considered neither a prime nor a composite number! It is considered a unit number because it only has one factor, which is itself, not meeting the criteria for either prime or composite numbers. There is so much interesting learning being done!