Better Than a Box of Chocolates!

Happy Valentine's Week!  Celebrating Heart Day is one of our favorite parts of teaching.  Not only do we get showered with hugs, love notes, and chocolates...but it's always sweet to watch the kids exchange, too!

If you're looking for some fun math centers to try this week, check out our pack HERE.  It's on sale for $3.20.  There are 5 multiplication/division games and a homework pass.  The games are common core aligned and tons of fun!  We also score some major brownie points each year when we give a homework pass as our Valentine.  We attach a piece of candy and the kids act as if they have struck gold!

Below are some pics of the pack in action.  You can also download our Fill Your Hearts With Arrays bingo game for free when you click HERE.  Enjoy!  We'd appreciate some love in the comment section if you liked it.  Thanks!

Division Memory to review basic facts under 100

Sweetheart Spin to practice multiplication facts under 100.

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Monday Math Mania

Happy Monday!

We thought we'd share how we teach traditional long division when you use a good ol' paper and pencil.  First things first, teaching is all about "borrowing."   We have to give credit where credit is due.  We got this idea from a 4th grade teacher at our school and it's been a life saver.  We swear by this little acronym!

We introduce to you E.D.M.S.B.A  or Every Dirty Monkey Should Bathe Always or Estimate, Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down, Again.  We might as well stamp it to our foreheads for the week because we have said it 1,000 (and counting!) times.  Learn it, live it, love it.  That's what we tell our kids.  Those 5 words make all the difference! 

Here is a pic that we use to introduce this messy little guy to our kiddos.  Over the years, students have named him/her and made up stories about how he got in the bath.  Regardless, year after year they crave the consistency and reliability of this saying.

We practice long division on grid paper ONLY.  If we were stranded on a desert island with 20 third graders, forced to teach long division, and could only bring one thing....it would be grid paper!  And pencils.  Oops, so two things!

    
The grid paper keeps things nice and neat.  Let's be honest, every teacher has a little "control freak" in them.  There will be no shouting, "Line up the digits!"  when you use grid paper.  We have blackline masters in the back of our teaching manual, but you can find it pretty easily on the internet.  We photocopy the grid paper WITH the practice problems for almost a week before we let them loose on notebook paper.  It makes a huge difference!

Check out this little FREEBIE if you are starting long division.  The scaffolding of the picture and the grid paper will help your kiddos feel confident.  We modeled it on the SMART board and our kids were really into it!!  

So, that's what we do in our little third grade world!  Eventually we move on to three digit dividends.  Then the real fun starts when we get into problem solving and interpreting the remainder!  :)

Enjoy the week, friends!  Thanks for reading!

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.  ;)