Week of March 6th

This week it was lovely to have the opportunity to meet with so many of you during parent teacher conferences. Thank you for making the time and effort to join me online or to come into the school in person. We have so much to celebrate!

Several parents indicated how helpful it is for me to share the strategies your child is introduced to when learning new math concepts, so this week in our blog I will share the strategies we have begun to explore to learn division. Our focus this week was to learn how to skip count to divide. We discovered how to skip count on a number line, skip count using our fingers and that we can divide by sharing the total number of items and the number of times in each set. 

To use a number line we considered, what number is being divided? (20) How can you tell from the picture? (20 is where the arrows end) What number are we dividing by?(4) How can you tell? (4 is the size of the jump) So, what is the answer to 20 ÷ 4? (5) How can you tell from the picture? (the number of arrows) 




We also discovered that skip counting can be performed by  keeping track of the number of times you skip count, using fingers. For example when skip count by 5s to 20 aloud. The sequence should look like this: We want to think of how many fingers we have up ?(4) How many numbers did we say? (4) So, 20 divided by 5 is 4. 

Our last strategy we used was to skip count with our fingers by picturing the numbers at the ends of our fingers. For example, to calculate 12 divided by 3, we skip count by 3s, starting with the thumb. The number 12 appears on the fourth finger, so 12 divided by 3 is 4. What is 15 divided by 3? (5) Point out that when skip counting by 3s, 15 appears on the fifth finger. 


 

Below is a great video to help explain it one more time. Please support your child by practicing these skills up to 50 divided by 5. In the coming weeks we will be continue to build on our multiplication and division skills to include 9x9 and 81divided by 9.

 https://youtu.be/OefSF803hBs





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