I'm popping in today to share some long division teaching strategies, activities, and anchor charts that have been sitting since December just waiting to be posted. 🙂 Time slips away, doesn't it?
Division Teaching Strategies Anchor Charts
We started out our division unit by making this little chart in our notebooks. We needed a quick way to review division and get into the division mindset! This is a picture of my teacher notebook that I projected using the document camera while the students made their own version in their notebooks.
We spent several days working on basic division and making sure they were solid on that. I also spent copious amounts of time talking about how multiplication relates to division… they needed that frame of mind to get ready for long division. Oh, long division. It's a doozy, that's for sure!
Here is a peek at my teacher notebook (again, I create it with them as they take notes in their notebooks. I didn't pull out any fun foldables for this one because it is such a tough concept I wanted them really focusing on the concept. You can also see the anchor chart I made to replicate the notebook page. This hangs in the classroom for reference.
Real World Division Project
We spent as much time as we possibly could on division, primarily working in math workshop groups so that I could work on reteaching and enriching in small groups. I usually have three stations for my math workshop model: Task Cards and/or Games, Independent Work, and Meet With Teacher. We did two really fun activities during independent work… the students BEGGED to keep working on that station time and time again!
The first one we worked on was my Movie Marathon Division Project. This one gives them so much division practice that is all real-world and incredibly engaging, if I do say so myself. In the past, I have also sent this home as an at-home project or used it as an assessment.
…and yes, popcorn is the perfect snack to munch on while they are working on this project!
Free Division Project
The other independent work project we did was actually slightly different than what is pictured here because we did it with a Christmas Tree! Since I am so late getting this posted, I wanted to adapt it so that it could be used any time of year, and so the Division House was born! As much as I loved how all of their trees turned out in the Christmas version, I love the house version even more! Some students may need a little bit of help getting started or building their equations, but overall, most students could complete this division activity by themselves.
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Division Task Cards
During Meet with Teacher and the Task Card Station, we used several of the resources from my Long Division Resource Bundle. You can check that out HERE. Their favorite from the Task Card station was the Write & Solve Task Cards! They are given two numbers and then a theme and they have to write their own division word problem. It was so much fun to see what they came up with. 🙂
Introducing Remainders
After we were pretty solid on long division, I introduced the concept of interpreting remainders. While they had been working with remainders, we really hadn't required them to think critically about what the remainders represented, particularly in word problems. We made a foldable with examples of what you might do with the remainders. Each tab has a word problem example under the flap.
I have set up the template to be printed double sided. If you don't have that option, just print both pages and glue the examples in.
Remainder Task Cards
Also in our math notebooks, we worked through some of my interpreting remainders task cards. I didn't end up putting these in a center because I really wanted to hear their thinking about remainders. We did several in Meet With Teacher and several as exit tickets (I just print them out for each student and they glue them to paper then turn them in).
Division Assessment
Our unit ended like most do… with an assessment! In the past, I have also used the Movie Marathon project as an assessment, but with standards-based grading, we need so much evidence. Here is a free long division assessment (you can also use it as review or just as printable practice) that I created!
You can download the FREE Long Division Quiz or Review HERE.
Happy teaching! If you have any other long division teaching strategies, activities, or ideas please feel free to share them! It seems I can never get enough.
