My 12 months 6 daughter has lately learnt lengthy division. To be clear on what I am referring to, lengthy division appears like this:
Whereas ‘brief division’ appears like this (that is generally colloquially known as a ‘bus cease technique’):
The one distinction between the 2 strategies is that in brief division we work out the remainders in our head and jot them down within the dividend, however in lengthy division we work out the rest on paper in a extra structured format. In case your divisor is larger than twelve (for instance should you’re dividing by 28) then it is perhaps difficult to work out remainders in your head, in order that’s usually when the lengthy division format is perhaps most popular. However they’re basically the identical technique, simply with a barely totally different construction for processing the calculations.
It was humorous to see my daughter studying lengthy division because it’s one thing that I actually by no means educate in secondary faculty. I used to be happy with myself for remembering the way it works. For a lot of college students it exists in 12 months 6 alone, by no means to be seen once more. A typical Key Stage 2 SATs query would possibly seem like this:
However one thing like that is extremely unlikely to come back up at GCSE. College students do generally must do divisions by hand of their non-calculator GCSE examination (an instance is proven under, from the Basis tier), however I believe most college students would select to make use of brief division.
Some folks argue that the lengthy division algorithm is used once more when college students study algebraic division in 12 months 12. This may occasionally have been the case ten years in the past, however I believe that the majority(?) A degree academics now want extra intuitive strategies of polynomial division, just like the issue technique proven under for instance.Â
So for essentially the most half, lengthy division resides solely in 12 months 6. And my daughter, who’s within the ‘center’ group for maths, was coping superb with it, however she advised me that she finds it difficult to put in writing out the multiples at first. For instance when she’s dividing by 28, she’s been advised to start by writing out some multiples of 28. She finds this time-consuming, a bit difficult, and somewhat uninteresting.
However don’t be concerned, as a result of there is a actually easy solution to write out the multiples of 28. My colleague Sian confirmed me this – she picked it up just a few years in the past from her daughter’s 12 months 6 trainer. I confirmed my daughter, who beloved it – she was then in a position to grasp lengthy division as she’d discovered a approach around the difficult bit.
To shortly and simply write out the multiples of 28, simply write the multiples of 20 and the multiples of 8 and add them collectively:
So long as the kid is aware of their customary occasions tables pretty effectively, itemizing the 2 units of multiples is easy. And the addition is fairly easy too, as they’re all the time including to a a number of of ten.
This is one other instance: multiples of 17.
This may occasionally already be actually broadly utilized by 12 months 6 academics. However in case anybody hadn’t considered this tremendous easy approach of itemizing multiples, I assumed it value sharing right here. As I’ve all the time stated, even when it simply helps one individual then it is value taking the time to put in writing about it.
