Division Lesson Plans: 3 Great Division Lessons

Fun Division Lessons

Use Music

Music often stimulates interest in any topic, even division. Division Rap from Rock 'N Learn is an example of a DVD that introduces pretty much everything elementary students need to know about division in 55 minutes (www.rocknlearn.com). Animated characters visually present both division concepts and division facts. Teachers can use the whole video or choose a specific portion to match the lesson of the day.

Teachers have also written and adapted a lot of rap songs about long division, often including motions. Many have shared these on YouTube.com. These songs generally focus on teaching the long-division steps: divide, multiply, subtract and bring down.

Act Out a Story

Create a division story for the class to act out. Alternatively, use a storybook to start and then add your own problems for the class to work on.

One commonly used book is The Doorbell Rang by Pat Hutchins. The story is simple: mother bakes enough cookies so that the children can each have six. But the doorbell rings over and over again, and the children must re-distribute the cookies between them all. Finally, each child has only one. That is, until Grandma arrives with more cookies.

Using the pictures in the book, the class can count the number of children and the number of cookies and predict how the cookies will be divided on the next page. After the book has been read, with a supply of paper 'cookies' on hand, reenact the story in the classroom. The children will love to dramatize the groans whenever more children arrive and the cheers when grandma brings extra cookies.

Play a Game

There are many games for learning or reinforcing math facts and concepts. A simple one to use is human Bingo. Give each student a Bingo sheet; each sheet has the same numbers in the squares but they are arranged differently. Have each student wear a 3 x 5 card with a division problem on it, such as 20 ÷ 5 = ?. The problems that students wear match the answers on the Bingo sheet.

To play, have the students mingle, look at the cards on other student's shirts and figure out the answers to the problems they see. Then, matching the name of the person with the problem to the answer on their Bingo sheet, students write the name in the proper square. The game is most effective if it is played in complete silence.