My dd has always been good in math. Now, she hates it so she often puts a wall up....but after I build a seige tower and she relents she does very well. lol. She loves patterns and abstract stuff...story problems and even fractions. However, the plain black and white problems bore her to tears and she often needs help relating that to what is already in her brain. She is a natural at math and the whole workbook thing kinda screwed her up. So, I am not sure where the disconnect is with long division. She just cannot do a long division problem on her own. she gets confused at when to divide, multiply, subtract...or count the chickens whatever. We have worked on it forever and she isn't getting it on her own. She knows what division is...she knows what the divisor and dividend are and all that jazz. She can do all the simple division. So, only a fool does the same thing over and over and expects different results...so anyone have an suggestions on books, ideas, websites or anything...I would really appreciate it!
Oh man.. there was a site we used... uggggg I didnt' bookmark it, and now I have no clue what it was.... I will try to poke around a bit today and look for it.
One thing that worked for my daughter was coming up with a visual - a circle graphic that she could refer back to that helped her memorize the order and operations. I have a run down and a picture on my blog - http://daybydayhsing.blogspot.com/2008/04/long-division-conquered.html
I am going to look around for you, too. I understand the deer in headlights look. I have used graph paper to do division problems. That seems to help sometimes. Determination and a timer. From The Homeschool Library, a thread on this topic: First, we wrote the steps out on an index card. Then I made up a bunch of long division problems and wrote each one on an index card. We continued on with his math, but each day he chose three cards to do. At first, I sat with him, pointed to each step, asked, "What's next", etc... After a week or so of that, I still sat with him, but only helped if I saw the need. Then, I left him on his own (still using the card with the steps written on it) but was in the same room in case he got stuck. Eventually, he was able to do them on his own without the card. Links I found on this thread...www.superkids.com/aweb/tools/math/;...ets Hope some of this may help you, AvaRose.
Thanks ladies. I wrote down the Divine Circle of Division! I love the name. I will try it out. This girl is driving me crazy....she understands before division, and the lessons after division but not long division...so hopefully this will fill in the gap. Keep the suggestions coming!
hey do you do the X thing under each number as you bring it down? That helped my ds when he was having a bump in that area. We x it then bring it down, I even had them draw arrows to help .. sometimes things are not too hard but they just are time consuming.. ds was fussing at multiplying deicimals until he learned to divide with them. Now he looks over at these huge numbers and says WHEW I have easy stuff over there! Lol! perspective!
Hi, Ava, Here is what was an absolute DELIGHT to my son! Hope it helps! http://www.kidsnumbers.com/long-division.php
I had my boys do long division on a dry erase board and that seemed to do the trick. If they made a mistake it was easily corrected. Just a thought!
help with long division From what you said, it sounds like your daughter is a visual learner. It would help her to "see" division to understand it. One way I have used may sound complicated but it works well for my students. You'll need paper plates and base ten blocks or a quantity of something small to represent hundred blocks, ten blocks and ones blocks. The hundred blocks could be jello size boxes, ten blocks could be pencils and the ones Cheerios! Anything around the house that you have multiplies of because you'll need quite a few. Start with a number, let's say 632. Have your daughter "build" the number using the base ten blocks (or the items that represent them). Check to see that in fact she has 6 - hundreds, 3 - tens and 2 ones. You can give your daughter a number to divide it by or let her choose a number under 10. Whatever number she chooses, have her get out that many paper plates and lay them out before her. For this example I'm going to say that we will be using 4 as the divisor. So there will be 4 plates out. Ask your daughter to evenly divided the hundred's blocks first among the plates. When she looks at you when she has 2 - hundreds blocks left, you may ask her "What is another way to look at the hundreds blocks? What can we do to break up the hundreds into smaller units?" If she needs further hints, ask her what she needs to do when she is subtracting numbers that need regrouping? She needs to regroup the 2 remaining hundreds blocks into 20 -tens blocks. It is still 2 hundred, just in a different form. Now can she divide the 20- ten blocks plus the 3 - tens she had originally evenly among the plates? She'll find that she will need to regroup 3 -tens blocks into 30 - ones blocks (see why you need a lot of items!). Have her divide the 30- ones plus her original 2 on the plates. When she is done, she shouldn't have a remainder. I'm thinking of making a video of doing this since it is difficult to imagine without seeing all the items divided on the plates. Would you find that helpful? Let me know if you have any questions, I would be happy to help. Cynthia
