Today we began division. I always suck my kids in by telling them I'm going to teach them how to divide without division. They never believe me, but it doesn't take long for them to figure out where I'm going. We use multiplication to divide! After all, multiplication is way more fun than division, right? ;)
We begin with numbers that have no remainder, such as 256 divided by 2. We start by taking out small groups of 2, perhaps 10 groups of two. 10 groups of 2 would be 20, so we subtract 20. Then we can take another 10 groups out. After we do this a few times, the kids make the connection they can take bigger groups out and save themselves a few steps. Instead of taking 10 groups of 2 out 5 times, they can just take 100 groups of 2 out from the get-go. Then we continue to take out groups until we can no longer take any more. I have two examples here, and I've tried to color-code them so they make sense.
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