If you have 24 square piece of wood describe all the different ways you can make good rectangle by placing them side-by-side

This is an exercise you should actually do with real physical objects. The objects don't have to be wood and they don't have to be square for you to be able to arrange them into a rectangular shape. You can cut squares from paper, or use Scrabble™ tiles, poker chips, pennies, M&M™ candies, bottle caps, Legos™, Cheez-It™ crackers, pebbles, or any other objects of similar size and shape.

What you will find is that there are 8 possibilities, corresponding to the number of divisors of 24:

1×24, 2×12, 3×8, 4×6, 6×4, 8×3, 12×2, 24×1

If you make rectangles from numbers of pieces other than 24, you will find that only two rectangles are possible for prime numbers, like 23: 1×23 or 23×1. Even numbers of tiles will all have rectangles of 1×_ and 2×_ (as well as _×1 and _×2).

Doing this sort of playing with physical objects helps you develop number sense that can serve you well later. Don't discount it.

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