Explaining Long Division with Kitty Place Value Cards

DD is just now moving into long division–by that I mean we’ve done about a half-dozen problems together.  She really didn’t get it at all… so I wanted a more hands on way of showing her what was happening. Last week I made ED some kitty place value cards (haven’t gotten that post done!) for her to work on building numbers into the thousands, but it occurred to me that those are perfect for helping DD to understand what’s going on with long division.

I had ED (in kindergarten) build the number 1,332…

And then I had her find me 1,332 kitties with the small kitty-cards I made (download those free at the bottom of the post).

ED was done… and then it was time for DD to do some long division with those kitties.  Her problem was

1,332 ÷ 3

I showed her the big Montessori thousand block of beads and asked if she could divide that among 3 people.  Nope… so, we split the thousand into 10 100 cards… and added those to the 3 other hundred cards.  She divided those 13 (hundred kitties cards) into 3 groups… and wrote down the results… each person got 4 (hundred) with one left over:

The next step was to tackle the 10s column. Since she had the one left-over 100s card she split that into 10 rows of 10 kitties. Then she took all 13 (rows of 10) and divided them into 3 even groups again. She had one leftover row of 10…

Finally, she traded that one row of 10 for 10 individual kitties… added that to the 2 final pieces, and divided those 12 individual kitties into 3 even piles:

Anyway, I think that made a lot more sense to her and we’ll probably do one problem just like this for the next week or so.

The 100s kitty place value cards are available free to download if you are interested. When printing, be sure to print out 2 pages per sheet.

Kitty-Hundreds Place Value Cards

If you wind up using this activity in your homeschool or classroom, I’d love to hear how it went over at my Homeschool Den Facebook Page! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter!  ~Liesl