Teaching the Distributive Property of Multiplication to 3rd graders is tough. Students struggle with understanding the concept (associative property too!). I always begin our work with area models so students can visually see the model being decomposed into smaller groups. I have an in-depth blog post that shows how I introduce the Distributive Property of Multiplication using area models that walks through my lesson step-by-step. After that initial introduction, I work with larger numbers than