My Favorite Way to Introduce Division…
My favorite way to introduce division is with Divide and Ride which is a book by Stuart Murphy. I have posted about it before, but since many of you are teaching division now or soon will be, I wanted to share some of the sheets that I have developed to go along with the book. These sheets are in varying levels of difficulty. The first one is easiest and they get slightly harder. I have used them with different grade levels. The first one I used with second graders, but most of them have been used with third grade. The first question on most of the sheets is the same because it can be easily figured out with direct modeling…but if you have all of the sheets you could easily differentiate for your students since they are similar. The last sheet incorporates a question with remainders. Feel free to download them and use them for free. Let me know if they work well for your class.
Take a Ride with Division
My favorite way to begin teaching division to third graders (or fair shares with younger students) is to read Stuart J. Murphy’s Divide and Ride book. This is a short story about kids who go to an amusement park to ride roller a roller coaster and various other rides. In each scenario of the story different amounts of seats are available with different amounts of children to fill each seat. These scenarios provide a way to discuss division to students. Remainders are even discussed when students must be left off of the ride because there are no more seats. After reading this book, students can use a circle mat or egg carton to represent the rides with counters or beans to represent children on each ride. If you want to be extra cutesy, you can decorate an egg carton like a roller coaster and place puffballs with googly eyes inside to represent students :). For a free CircleMat which is useful for multiplication or division, click the link.
