The Distributive Property - Inquiry Based Discovery Lesson Bracelet Investigation

The Distributive Property - Discovering & Understanding How Distributing Actually Works: This lesson is an investigation of the Distributive Property. This is a great introduction for the first time seeing the property. You can have students work through this set of worksheets before they have been exposed to the Distributive Property. It also can be a great review for students who are revisiting the property. They will get a deeper look and gain more understanding of how the Distributive Property really works.   The activity is based on making bracelets. Students develop expressions for the cost of each bracelet order and rewrite it different ways using the distributive property before they are even aware that they are using any property. The Distributive Property is named and introduced on the fourth page and is followed up with practice.   You can use beads as manipulatives if you'd like, but the discovery lesson is designed with plenty of graphics so that it also works well wit