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Division

Division

A Lesson Designed Around One Problem—100 ÷ 3

Did I teach an entire division lesson focused on just one problem? Yes! From giving many hundreds of interviews where students solve problems mentally, we’ve learned that solving 100 ÷ 3 is often a challenge. After recently interviewing and hearing two answers for 100 ÷ 3 that I’d never heard before, I taught this lesson.
Marilyn Burns
December 9, 2024
DivisionGeneral InterestNumber and OperationsNumerical ReasoningReal-World ProblemsSilent MathWord Problems

One Lesson, Two Pedagogical Mistakes

I believe strongly that mistakes are learning opportunities. At least that’s what I regularly tell students. But it sometimes feels different when the mistakes are mine . . . and especially when they are pedagogical mistakes that I make while teaching. That happened to me recently when teaching a lesson to fourth graders.
Marilyn Burns
January 1, 2018
AssessmentBooks by MarilynDivisionGeneral InterestMath and LiteratureMultiplicationNumber and OperationsNumerical ReasoningProblem SolvingWord Problems

One Lesson, Three Grades, Three Twists

The children's book 17 Kings and 42 Elephants by Margaret Mahy is one of my long-time favorites. In this post I describe a division lesson that I’ve taught to third graders but recently revisited with fourth- and fifth-grade classes. With the older students, we tried extensions that differentiated the experience and put students in charge of deciding on problems for themselves. It was exciting to me to expand a lesson I've taught many times into a multi-day investigation.
Marilyn Burns
January 30, 2017