Did you know there is more than one way to do long division and multiplication with large numbers? I had no idea that there were multiple strategies until I began teaching overseas and I was introduced to different strategies by my students and their parents. As a class, we broke down the different “short hands” of the strategies and discovered that if you wrote down every step, which is something we rarely do, because so much is done mentally, there were three basic strategies for long division. Then I did the same thing for the three other operations and put all of these strategies into four Long Operations Posters. My students added these posters to their notebooks and I posted them on the wall. After awhile, my students learned the similarities and the differences between the different strategies and knowing this made them stronger in mathematical reasoning. If you’d like to share these strategies and these posters with your students, feel free to download the posters for free from my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
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