­­­­You're familiar with coins because you spend them almost every day of your life. That's why this lesson should be easy to understand. We'll find out how to learn multiplication by solving coin number family problems.

You know that a nickel is worth 5 cents. You also know that a dime is worth 10 cents. Using what you know, we're going to work the multiplication number family problems with coins.

Some coin problems tell how many coins you have. In this problem, we'll deal with nickels. Each nickel is worth 5 cents. That's the first number in the family. The other lesser (smaller) number is N. That's the number of nickels we have. The greatest (larger) number is the number of cents we have. That's C.

We have 4 nickels, so we have 4 times 5. That equals 20 cents. The first multiplication fact in this number family is 4 times 5 equals 20 (4 × 5 = 20). What is the other multiplication fact? The other multiplication fact is 5 times 4 equals 20 (5 × 4 = 20).

Here's a coin problem with dimes. Remember how they work? The first lesser number tells how much each coin is worth. The lesser number is 10 because each dime is worth 10 cents. The other lesser number tells how many dimes we have. We have 4 dimes. The greatest number is the number of cents we have. We have 10 times 4 (10 × 4). That equals 40 cents.

Now let's try coin problems that tell how many cents you have.

Write 5 for the first lesser number because each nickel is worth 5 cents. Does this problem show the number of nickels or the total number of cents? It shows the total number of cents. So we write 40, for 40 cents. Here, we have to figure out the number of nickels. We divide 40 by 5, which equals 8 (40 ÷ 5 = 8). That's 8 nickels!