Math Club Sessions 2 & 3 - Long Division

This year I'm doing an after school Math Club with four children grades 4-8 who don't go to my school -- and don't have access to the Montessori math materials at home -- and are struggling a bit in math and need support.

The Montessori manipulatives are wonderful for introducing math concepts but they can also be used remedially with children. Children who need to see and hear the concepts explained in a different way, or who need more practice but with work that feels fresh and interesting, really respond well to the Montessori approach, especially if they learn best by being able to explore the math concepts physically through manipulating materials or benefit from the visual support of the color coding cues for place value.

Here are all of the notes in this series:

Math Club Session 1 - Place Value

In sessions 2 and 3, we focused on Long Division with the Racks & Tubes.

Session 2 (Sep 12)
- recall the Montessori color coding for place value

- introduction to Long Division Material / Racks & Tubes / Test Tube Division

- solve several problems from the Long Division Activity Set

Session 3 (Sep 19)
- play Remainders Wanted: Long Division Game (FREE on TpT)

Notes:

There were three children at Math Club today. Each child got four tokens. This was the right amount of work for a one hour session.

We used the Racks & Tubes exclusively in the beginning of the hour, and then I began to demonstrate how to solve some of the simpler problems on the chalkboard with abstraction (imagining the material as we went through it).

For children who were beginning to understand the long division algorithm midway through the hour, we would meet one-on-one and solve it with pencil and paper on a clipboard and then see if the children using the hands-on material got the same solution to the problem that we did!

By the end of the hour, two children wanted to work their problems using the long division algorithm and one child preferred the hands-on method.