Division Downlow

We admit it…we haven’t always introduced long division this way.  We haven’t always made it this fun, either!  But, over the last 2 years, we have come to love “the foldable.”  It’s a fun, hands-on, interactive way to get your kids thinking about a particular topic.  This year, we began our division quest with this triangular foldable. 

You can download one for free HERE

 Anyway, we set up math centers for about 2 weeks so our kiddos could get comfortable with division facts.  Each day we tried to introduce a new game until all of the facts under 100 were memorized (or so we hoped!).  The kids became fluent quickly because they knew their multiplication facts.  We will do another post on how we master our math facts soon!

Before we knew it, it was time to get into long division.  It happens every year…. There is a poor, sweet, innocent, nine year that looks like a total deer in headlights when we tell them the steps. They are all…"We have to divide, multiply, subtract, bring down numbers, do it all over, there may be a remainder???  WHAT!"  Sometimes they get real, live tears in their eyes!  We can’t have that.  It’s music to our teacher ears when they say, “Long Division is fun!” or “Give us a really hard one!”   Luckily, we had a lot of that this year!  

 

We played this fun freebie that you can try HERE.  Have yall ever played Scoot?  It’s similar to that game, but instead of rotating around the room, your children will rotate 4 times. 

Divide your children into groups of 4.  Each time they rotate, they are trying to model a division sentence.   After placing an equal number of chips in each box, they will notice they have a remainder each time.  

 Modeling with chips or blocks will really show the process of splitting your dividend into equal groups.  Take that Common Core!!

 “But what happens when you have left over chips?” your sweet darlings will ask inquisitively.  And that, my friends, is when the term remainder will be introduced and all will be right with the world!  It was a lightbulb explosion!  Our kiddos were so excited, it was too cute!

We will post more about how we teach long division with paper/pencil later this week.  

We hope this isn’t the longest post in the world…our poor moms.  ;)