New Unit - Number Studies

We are now looking at a new unit for the rest of this term. It will just be a quick unit on numbers and how we use these. It is quite an important unit, as it provides the foundations for a lot of other maths and maths skills we use in the future.

The first things we looked at today was recapping on multiples and factors. We looked at these during our unit on fractions, however if you do need some reminding, this website is really handy:
http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/factors-multiples.html

We then had a chat about prime numbers and composite numbers. A prime number is a number that has only 2 factors, 1 and itself. A composite number is a number that has more that 2 factors.

Finally we had a look at factor trees. A factor tree is basically a way of visualising all of the prime factors of a number. We start with the number itself, then split this into a pair of factors. We then split each of these into pairs of factors, and so on until we are left with just prime number (which cannot be split any further). An example could be:

This shows 3 different factor trees of the number 108. You can see that each factor tree always finishes with the same set of numbers (in green). These numbers are the prime factors of 108. If we multiply all of these numbers together you will get your original number (in this case, 108). 

The work for this can be found under the "Worksheets" tab. It is one 5 page booklet that will last you for this whole unit. You should now be able to do most of the first page and a half. If you do know how to do more of the content, keep going with it. If not, we will look at some more stuff on this unit on Tuesday. 

As always, if you do have any questions feel free to comment on this post, or email or chat to me in person.