Multi-Digit Multiplication Strategy: Partial Products

This week, students will be taking a familiar strategy, Break Apart Factor(s) by Place Value, and applying it to two-digit by two-digit multiplication problems.  Though the order of finding and combining partial products will not change the final answer (Commutative Property), I used the first four colors of the rainbow to help students figure out the partial products in the same order as the standard multiplication algorithm (the way most of us learned to multiply multi-digit numbers...red is the first partial product, orange is the second, etc).  I'm hoping this will make the transition easier when we get there.  :-)  I'm also encouraging the students to use a calculator to check their final answer after they've worked out the problem using this strategy.