![]() ![]() You’ll probably notice that regardless of which type of division students are using, they often make circular piles of the item they are working with. Division With Arrays: Moving From Equal Group “Piles” to Rows and Columns If students are given large quantities of straight calculation problems and only few contextual problems like the goldfish problem shared above, they may not build the necessary fluency to approach contextual problems successfully when they do arise. How many goldfish will you put in each jar? You are going to put them in 5 jars evenly. To give another example, we could look to the following question from Alex Lawson’s book, What to Look For, where a student is asked to answer the following question: In other words, partitive division occurs when a scenario requires a student to divide a set of items into a given number of groups, where the number of items in each group is unknown. This type of division is possibly the first type of division students intuitively experience when they are young by sharing a group of items with their friends as we did earlier by sharing 12 carrots amongst 4 friends. The first type of division we will explore is called partitive division. Partitive Division Also Known As Fair Share or Sharing Division Something that is not stated explicitly in the Ontario mathematics curriculum and can easily be overlooked by elementary math teachers is that there are two types of division: partitive and quotative. ![]() Two Types of Division: Partitive and Quotative For example, a student successfully counting a group of items, one at a time. For example, our base ten place value system.īefore students can successfully unitize, they must be able to count via one-to-one correspondence. Understanding that every quantity we measure is relative to another pre-measured group we call a unit. Unitizing: Creating Groupsīefore we begin diving into division, I feel it is important for students to be very efficient with unitizing which I discuss in a separate post with counting principles. I would recommend first exploring the progression of multiplication prior to jumping into this post focusing on the opposite operation, division. I have found thinking about these pieces as pivotal in my own understanding of how division is constructed over time, but will likely continue changing as my own understanding deepens. This is by no means a complete progression and would welcome other pieces in the comments that I could add in to build on this post over time. After spending quite some time diving into division independently as well as collaboratively with educators through workshops, I will attempt to share what I believe to be some pretty important pieces along the progression of division. However, what I found interesting this year was how much of a struggle it was for teachers to attempt representing division from a conceptual standpoint instead of simply relying on a procedure. While I often hear teachers concerned about multiplication skills of their students, an operation that doesn’t come up too often in discussion is division. As a secondary math teacher turned K-12 math consultant, I’ve had to spend a significant amount of time tearing apart key number sense topics including the operations. Over the past school year, I have had an opportunity to work with a great number of K to 8 teachers in my district with a focus on number sense and numeration. ![]() Division From Fair Sharing to Long Division and Beyond ![]()
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