Interpreting Remainders Lessons and Ideas for the Classroom

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Interpreting Remainders with Division:  A Simple Strategy for a Hard Concept for Elementary Students

It took me a long while to figure out how to teach interpreting remainders to students who are just starting to learn about division.  Up to the point that I teach them, students have only seen numbers that work out perfectly.

Well, there is one simple strategy that has helped my students to understand how to interpret remainders.  I love bar modeling in math, but I had to admit that bar modeling falls a little short to show division.  After all, students are usually starting with a whole number and then chopping it up in equal chunks.  It can be done, but I have found that there is a easier way to teach how to deal with left-overs.

I start by doing a lot of work with understanding the meaning of multiplication and division.  One great activity is my Giant Candy Box Research project.  I will post the free resource when it is done.  When using tiles in this project, there is a easy way to show students which numbers have remainders and which numbers don't.  I plan on posting a video of this method because it will help a lot of teachers to show students how remainders work.

I used to dread teaching division but after explicitly teaching this one problem solving strategy, I have found success.  In my next post, I'll explain.  I am a working teacher, so if you are dying to know click on the email list and I will give you what I have in rough form.

Anyway, I start teaching interpreting with remainders by explaining why I am angry with the hot dog guy.  I got the idea for it from a Steve Martin movie.  Here is the clip.  I now call interpreting remainders, hot dog bun problems.  I will let you know why in a future post, but if you watch this clip, you can probably figure it out.

So, what is the strategy that helps students interpret remainders?

I love explicitly teaching the problem solving strategy using an organized chart and one of its best applications is for solving division problems.  I will be posting some resources soon.