Division in Grade Three
Most of my students have very little understanding of division before we start learning about it in grade three. We start the year with reviewing our addition and subtraction facts and at the beginning of every class, we practice skip counting by a different number to help warm up our brains. We usually start with 2s, 5’s and 10s before moving onto the more difficult ones My goal is for my students to have a solid and deep understanding of their number facts to 20. We practice using a variety of tools and strategies, including fact families, cuisenaire rods, card games (addition and subtraction war) and the Explain Everything app on the iPad. I want my students to have a solid understanding of how addition and subtraction are related. Once they have a solid understanding of these two concepts, we move to multiplication. I introduce as “groups of.” We use the same tools and strategies that we used for addition and subtraction (but we add in arrays and multiplication war with cards), and we spend a lot of time using our digital whiteboards or just regular white boards drawing the visualization for each equation, as well as the related addition sentence. For example, we do 3 x 2 = ?. First they would draw 3 groups and then 2 items in each group. They would write the addition sentence as 2 + 2 + 2 = 6.
Now that my students have a solid understanding of addition, subtraction and multiplication, we move onto division. When I ask my students how many know how to divide, usually I have only a handful of students who know what division is and even fewer know how to divide. Therefore, I always start with using manipulatives so that students can see how to “split” or “share” the items into groups. For example, I will give them ten items and tell them to share them between two hula hoops (or small plastic bracelets). We continue practicing until all my students are successful at completing the “dividing of items” task. The next step is to show them what the division equation looks like for each of the questions that I pose (share 8 items between 2 kids is the same as 8 / 2 = 4). The students practice this in partners until they feel successful. We then move onto using the cuisenaire rods (if you don’t know how to use cuisenaire rods to teach division, here is a video), arrays and fact families. My students use the Explain Everything app to explain how to do multiplication and division. This way I can see if they fully understand both of these concepts.
I teach most of my math concepts very similarly. I figure out what my students know before we start and what they have questions about. This helps guide my lessons. If it is a completely new concept we start with working in small groups on some hands-on exploratory activities (including watching introductory videos) before we practice answering questions using a whiteboard (digital and regular). We usually create a video (either using Book Creator or Explain Everything) to show others our understanding of the concept. My students love watching each others’ videos or sharing them with another class. Here is an example of a video that one of my students created last year (not sure why the top of it is cut off – sorry!)
References:
Making Equal Groups. (n.d.). Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://jr.brainpop.com/math/multiplicationanddivision/makingequalgroups/
Teaching Division with Cuisenaire Rods – Math Video. (2018, January 30). Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://vimeo.com/42309729
P. (2017, November 16). Explain Everything | Interactive Whiteboard App. Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://explaineverything.com/