I begin this lesson by drawing the area model and having students label the parts of the area model and the division and multiplication number sentence represented by the area model. While I strongly prefer using partial quotient for multi-digit division, dividing with area models help students build essential conceptual understanding. They recognize the connection between using multiplication and division, and the grouping strategy began to have more meaning to students. This was a natural progression for students, and it actually made sense to them. Students can also solve division problems with division, rather than multiplication. I began with heavily scaffolded problems and gave students more and more responsibility as they progressed through the assignment. They were absolutely blown away when they saw this strategy for solving division problems! It is also great reinforcement for the distributive property. In this activity, students broke the division problem into partial products and found the missing number in the partial products. While this is fairly simple with problems such as 36 divided by four, it can be more challenging when the dividend is a larger number. You can also show students how to use multiplication to solve long division problems. This activity helped solidify students’ understanding of the concept of long division, and the base ten blocks helped make the concept more concrete. Students use base-ten blocks and pictures to model long division problems. Otherwise, students tend to look at me with blank stares as we discuss division vocabulary and concepts.īefore teaching dividing with area models and partial quotient help students connect place value and division. Teach a few hands-on division lessons that are a review of students’ third grade standards. If students can firmly grasp that idea, dividing of larger numbers is so much easier. It’s essential that students understand that division is repeated subtraction of equal groups. First Reviewīefore introducing multi-digit division, backtrack a bit and spend a little time on the concept of division. Even without the unit, you should be able to get a lot of good ideas for teaching dividing with area models and partial quotient. All of the printables shown in this post are from my division unit. We want students to grasp the how and why of what they are doing and to become flexible in their thinking. When teaching dividing with area models and partial quotient, we don’t want the strategies to be a series of steps for students to follow without any real meaning. If you want to see how I teach multi-digit multiplication, be sure to check out this blog post. In this post, I’ll keep the focus on multi-digit division.įor students to fully understand multi-digit division, they have to understand the concept of multiplication. You can read more about the value of teaching both concepts and procedures here. As a student, I only understood procedures. One of the reasons dividing with area models and partial quotient was confusing for me is that I had not learned multi-digit multiplication or division conceptually. Hopefully, this post will save you the headaches I experienced learning this important concept. All of a sudden, the pieces fell into place, and it all made sense. Confession: when I first moved to fourth grade, I had no clue how to divide with an area model or partial quotient! After teaching it to myself, I hated it! Dividing with area models and partial quotient didn’t click for me until I was actually teaching my class. Dividing with area models and partial quotient is a major part of fourth grade standards.
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