Are Your Students Struggling with Traditional Long Division?

Generally it takes students a few weeks initially to learn division– especially long division with multiple digits.  Marilyn Burns’ book Extending Division has several helpful hints within her lessons.  In place of the traditional method for division, she shows how to teach students with the ladder method in which students divide a dividend with multiples of ten rather than break the dividend apart like the traditional method.  The ladder method helps students understand numbers more effectively because they are estimating and thinking of the dividend as a whole. See this example to gain a better understanding of the ladder method.

Add all of the numbers to the right (the ladder) to find the quotient.