Middle Grades Math: The Magical Growth of Numbers

Students will learn to quickly add lists of numbers by adding like terms and using the distributive property. First, students will create a list from two numbers by adding the previous two terms and find the sum of the list. This will be used to explore the “magic” behind the summagic rule used by the teacher to quickly find the sum of a list of numbers.

Students explore more examples and see how the distributive property plays a role in this magic trick. As an extension, students can look at a situation with variables and try to generalize what is happening.