Division Strategies

On Monday, students began looking at math story problems that involve division! Students quickly realized that division and multiplication story problems are related. In multiplication, you know the number of groups and how much is in each group, you are just trying to find the product.  In division problems, you know the total and you are either sharing or finding how many groups. 

In the opening lesson, students were asked to visualize the problems and model their thinking in whatever way made sense to them! The anchor charts below show a variety of different strategies for solving division problems.  The students are making incredible connections and their division work is progressing daily! Students will have a short, basic division quiz this Friday. 

Students answer the following question: 

Miss Russell has 18 pencils. She wants to share them with herself and two friends. How many pencils will each person get? 

Leave us your answer in a comment below. Don't forget to include your first name only! :) 

Multiplication Strategy Work

On Friday, students began thinking about "Things That Come in Groups." As a class, we developed a chart with things that came in groups of 2-12. For example, four wheels on a car, 6 legs on an insect, 7 days in a week, etc. This was the very first lesson in our multiplication and division unit.

During the work period, students answered several basic "Equal Groups" problems.  Students set off to work with no discussion about multiplication or how even how to solve.  Instead, students were encouraged to use what they "visualized" in their mind about the problem to help them solve. We were blown away by the variety of different strategies and incredible math thinking that the students demonstrated! Check out the chart below for some the strategies that we shared in closing.

While some of the strategies are more efficient than others, all of the students are off to an incredible start!

It is extremely important for students to build this conceptual understanding of multiplication before jumping to "memorizing" facts.  If you let them work through this process, their thinking will be much more flexible, accurate and efficient as a result.

Also, don't forget that when we see the "X" symbol we say "groups of" in class. For example, 5 x 3 would be said "five groups of three." You can help at home by encouraging this vocabulary so that students are able to visualize what the problem looks like in their mind. :)

Students: What strategy is YOUR next step? 

Subtraction Strategies

In math class, we have been working on finding the distance between two numbers (subtraction). The following chart shows some of the strategies that students have been using in their work.  Every student is at a different point in their learning journey. When we come to our daily "closing meeting" during our math workshop, students are always looking for ways to make their work more efficient and sophisticated.