Last year, at the end of third grade, my daughter came to me with a sad confession. She just didn't get long division. Now, seven months later, she's a long division whiz, called upon to help other students in her class. What's her secret to success? She didn't give up. If you're looking for ways to help your kids with long division, here are some sites that can help.
All About Division is arranged as a series of three dozen single-page topics, ranging in difficulty from "Division Facts for Zero to Three" up to "Dividing Numbers in Scientific Notation." Each page includes a lesson (titled Learn), an interactive worksheet (Practice) and a timed quiz (Play.) After each section, you can either scroll down to the next section, or click Return to Top to navigate with the menu at the top of the page. My favorite activity was the Countdown quiz (in Play.) How many correct answers can you get in sixty seconds?
Discovery School calls this interactive worksheet a "solver." Enter a long division problem (such as 2345 divided by 54) and you'll get two answers. The first is the decimal answer you'd get from a calculator (43.4259). The second is the quotient with a remainder (43 R 23) along with all the "show your work" steps. In the drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner, you'll find dozens of solvers on topics as diverse as addition, permutations and polynomials.
Visit Improving Education for randomly-generated printable worksheets and answer keys. Worksheets are available starting with kindergarten-level math, so to get to the four division worksheets, you'll need to scroll down the page. Or use your browser Find on This Page function to search for "division." At each of the four levels, you can either generate just a worksheet, or a worksheet with an answer key. Want more of the same? Simply hit refresh and you'll be rewarded with a new worksheet with a different set of problems. Computers are so cool!
This is the best step-by-step explanation of long division I found on the Net. The page is a bit wide, though, so you'll probably need to scroll left to right to see the whole thing. In addition to this illustrated example of long division with remainders, there are two more pages on division (look for the links at the bottom of the page.) The first is an explanation of long division without remainders, and the second is an explanation of long division with decimal places in the quotient.
MathWork is another nifty site for generating printable division worksheets (but no answer keys.) Determine the difficulty level by specifying how many digits in the divisor (the number which divides the other number), how many digits in the quotient (the answer) and whether or not to include problems with remainders (the amount left over.) When you've generated the appropriate worksheet, hit browser refresh to get another worksheet with the same parameters. Look in the left-hand menu for two more division worksheets: single-digit horizontal problems and a five-minute drill that covers all the single-digit divisor facts.
The following links are either new discoveries or sites that didn't make it into my newspaper column because of space constraints. Enjoy!
Ask Dr. MathDivision Tips and Tricks | Go Forth & Multiply: Long Division |
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