Making Sense of Division (3rd-5th)

by C. Elkins, OK Math and Reading Lady

Is division a dreaded topic on your list of objectives to teach? Like many math topics, students have a harder time understanding it most likely because it’s not something they use regularly in their lives. Students should understand why division is useful before they have to start solving division problems. In this post, I will focus on helping students see the relationship between subtraction, multiplication, and division both with concrete objects, pictures, and the partial quotients model. Freebies available below!!

Then let’s talk about what division really is — it is repeated subtraction; much the way multiplication is repeated addition. The issue is that repeated subtraction is not always very efficient. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say I have the basic problem 25 ÷ 5.  I could start with 25 and then subtract 5, subtract another 5, another 5, another 5, and another 5 until I run out and reach zero.  I would have to do this 5 times. If I had 25 cookies that I wanted to share equally among 5 friends, I could do the “one for you, one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for you” process and still end up with 5 cookies for each. Or I could try “two for you, two for you,” etc. to make the action of passing out the cookies faster. When I get down to 5 cookies, I return to the “one for you . . .” to make it work.

With a larger problem such as 72 ÷ 6, I can again try subtracting 6 at a time until I reach zero. This would take 12 repetitions — not efficient, but still accurate. Could I subtract 12 at a time instead (2 groups of 6) to be more efficient? Or 18 at a time, or 24 at at time? This is the idea behind the partial quotients model I will refer to a little later. Continue reading