This week we have started our long division unit by exploring the different strategies we already know. The first question was: There is a water bottle vending machine in the teacher's lounge. This morning the delivery man was filling the machine and he said it can hold up to 156 water bottles. I noticed that the water bottles came in packages of 6. That got me wondering....how many packages can the machine hold?
To answer this questions the students were paired up with a partner and discussed the different strategies they came up with. A few of them were:
·       repeated adding/skip counting
·       trial and error multiplication
·       number lines
·       drawing all 156 bottles first, grouping them into groups of six, then counting the number of groups.
·       arrays
·       repeated subtraction
·       long division

After students discussed their strategies they wrote them on a big piece of chart paper and we had a "gallery walk.. Students left thoughtful comments to their peers about their thinking and their strategies and then we shared!