📝 Practice Worksheets
🛠️ Related Tools
🔑 Key Concepts
- The greatest common factor is the largest factor that two or more numbers share.
- The ladder method helps organize the process of dividing both numbers by common factors.
- Only divide by numbers that go evenly into both values at the same time.
- Multiply the common divisors on the left side of the ladder to find the GCF.
- If the numbers on the bottom row have no common factor other than \( 1 \), the ladder is complete.
✏️ Worked Examples – Finding the GCF With the Ladder Method
🧠 Math Vocabulary
- Greatest common factor (GCF): the largest factor shared by two or more numbers.
- Factor: a number that divides evenly into another number.
- Common factor: a factor that two or more numbers have in common.
- Ladder method: a strategy for finding the GCF by dividing by common factors step by step.
- Prime factor: a factor that is a prime number.
💡 Main Idea
This lesson teaches students how to find the greatest common factor using the ladder method. By repeatedly dividing both numbers by common factors, students can organize their work clearly and see exactly how the shared factor is built. This method is especially helpful for students who like a structured, step-by-step approach.
📚 What You Should Already Know
Before watching this video, students should understand what factors are, how to divide whole numbers, and how to recognize when one number divides evenly into another. Familiarity with multiplication facts is also very helpful.
🚀 What Comes Next
After learning the ladder method for GCF, students can compare GCF and LCM, use prime factorization to find common factors, simplify fractions, and solve word problems involving grouping or equal arrangements.
🧩 Embed This Video in Your LMS
Teachers can embed this YouTube video directly into Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, or another learning platform. Click below to show the embed code.