[tigerfan]

I need some new ideas on teaching 4th graders long division. I plan to use the daddy, mother, sister, brother, Rover acronym. I'm specifically wanting some lesson ideas to use with small groups of kids ... say 2 or 3 in a group.

Any ideas will be appreciated. This is the first time for me to post but I try to read all the wonderful ideas and insights as often as I can.

[Margaret916]

We do this with our kids to make them focus on one step at a time, without skipping!

The kids sit in a row. Kids are in first, second, third position and so on. First kid does the "goes into" step, passes white board or paper back, second kid does the multiply, passes it back, and so on.

One thing to stress is SPEED DOESN"T COUNT. Each team that finishes with a neat, correct answer, gets a point. Usually (hopefully!) it works to a tie.

It's just a different way to do the problems....

One thing that helps is that I have the white boards with the graphing grid on the back, so the kids write a number in each box if they have writing in a line issues.

[tigerfan]

That is a great idea! I do have white boards that I had planned on using, but they do not have the grid. I'm thinking about taking old transparencies and running the division symbol with lines for the answers on to them. Then they can write with the marker on the transparency which is laying on the white board. The only thing is, I don't know if it will erase very well.

Thanks again for responding!

[love_5th]

I teach everyday math and we have some cool new ways to learn division. One is partial sums.

17 divided into 360. Instead of the old way you look at 17 and the whole number 360. Lets say you say oh, 17 X 10 is 170. Subtract that from 360 and then use another 17 X 10. You end up with 21 times and a remainder of 13. It is really cool.

[love_5th]

How do you get the picture to show on your profile?

[BellJ]

I used the Does McDonald's Sell CheeseBurgers? trick. The reason that I really loved it was the Compare portion. Is the number you got after you subtracted less than your divisor? It really cut down on mistakes.

One idea I used in small groups was to use dice and have the students roll their own dividends.