As a math coach, I LOVE that I have an excuse to use lots of different math manipulatives.

But honestly?

Over the past several years, I’ve learned less is more (as with all things…except maybe cheese, HA!). And I’ve been working on a small collection of math manipulatives my students can use every day, across all math concepts.

Color tiles are the perfect example of manipulative we use very often.

These tiles are one of my absolute FAVORITE math manipulatives to use with my students of all ages.

Today we’ll take a quick, visual look at how to use color tiles in math. You will see 20 actionable photo ideas sharing easy ways to help bring various math concepts to life.

Materials Needed

Before we begin, let’s take a look at the different types of color tiles.

One of my favorites are these foam color tiles because they are super quiet as students are building:

I mean, I don’t mind noise in math…but I definitely prefer productive talk to the sound of tiles hitting the floor constantly!

However…

I do love plastic color tiles in some instances, as they give students an opportunity to write directly on the tile.

My friend Jen from Miss V in 3 taught me this when she shared how her students write on Unifix cubes with dry erase…genius!

No matter the tile you choose, another important resource will be a dry erase board. This will help your students really bring their math thinking to the next level, as they label models and write expressions and equations:

And as for the dry erase markers? My students and I absolutely adore these markers…they make it SO easy to draw models and write expressions and equations, thanks to the super fine tip:

Ok, now that we have the materials we need we can begin!

Arrays

Arrays are such a foundational concept and these square color tiles are PERFECT for building them!

The shape of the color tiles makes it very easy for students to line them up in rows and columns.

I also find arrays built with tiles lend themselves naturally to the area models students will build later on:

Students can represent arrays with repeated addition:

As well as multiplication expressions and equations:

The linear nature of the color tiles help students easily see “x rows of x”:

Factors and Products

Once students are secure in building those arrays, we can start to label factors and products:

This provides a hands-on opportunity to gain familiarity with these key terms.

Students can be asked to build arrays with certain factors and find the product:

And 4th and 5th graders can use a larger amount of color tiles to find all the factor pairs of the given number:

area

Area is a concept where these color tiles are crucial!

And this is where I like to pull out those plastic color tiles.

As students begin to build area models and learn exactly what area means, they can use a dry erase marker to find the area of rectangular figures:

As well as non-rectangular figures:

The area models created with color tiles are helpful as students move towards understanding how to use multiplication to find area:

Perimeter

Perimeter can be a challenging concept for students! Bringing those models to life with color tiles makes it so much, as they can feel and count each side of every square unit of a given figure:

It can be helpful for students to count each side of a rectangular figure when they are first introduced to perimeter:

Using color tiles can also help to model unknown side lengths, so students will have an better understanding when solving these problems on paper:

Prime and Composite numbers

Fifth grade math is not for the faint of heart, right??

I remember feeling slight panic at the thought of teaching prime and composite numbers in a way my students would truly understand.

But color tiles saved the day once again!

After learning the meaning of prime versus composite numbers, upper-elementary students can be given color tiles to explore the concept further.

They can then prove whether given numbers are prime or composite by building all the area models possible:

fractions on a number line

Yet another challenging concept for our upper-elementary learners!

But using color tiles on an open number line has been SUCH a game changer for my students.

Color tiles can help students build the fraction number line, as they use the edges of each tile to create the marks:

The tiles help students understand those fractions between 0 and 1, as well as identifying benchmark fractions:

And as students gain more comfort with working with fractions on an open number line, they can move onto representing fractions in multiple ways:

My students love to show off their knowledge, representing these fractions as both mixed numbers AND improper fractions:

color tiles on Math Mats

As you can see, we use color tiles for all kinds of concepts in my math groups.

I also LOVE using math mats to help my students build and draw math models with our tiles:

You can grab a set of these mats here: Math Mats

I hope these ideas are of help as your student explore new concepts! Thanks so much for reading!