Any Year 3 teachers around?

[Whitchiteegrub]

Good evening

I am not sure if this will have a generic answer or whether the answer will depend on what method individual schools teach. My child is struggling with fractions in maths, and also division. She is in year 3. There seem several different methods I can use to help her to work them out but she looks blank when I ask her if the way I’m showing her is the way she learns them at school. Fraction wise an example she gave me is 2/3 of 12. I can obviously get to the answer but am not sure the correct way to show her. I can ask her teacher when back at school after Easter but wanted to try and get in some extra practice for her before she goes back. Division she gave me a sum of 38/3 , obviously this doesn’t work out exactly so I’m not sure if she is only working out sums that exactly divide at the moment and or whether she has given me a bad example but would the bus stop method be used for this? Help! Please!

Different schools would have different calculation policies.
Easiest option:
fractions - divide by the bottom, multiply by the top
dividing - bus stop

I responded on your other thread.

In our school Year 3 aren't taught bus stop method yet. Division is done through partitioning

I currently teach year 2 but have taught year 3. I would do it practically to see how it relates to divisiin. Get twelve objects. Explain that thirds is the same as 3 equal groups so then get three bowls or draw three circles. Share out the 12 objects equally. See that each group has 4 objects. Each group is one third. You could explain then that it's the same as 12 divided by 3 equals 4. Then show her that two of the groups has 8 objects. That's two thirds.

Hi, as you say, there are several ways to look at this.

Division is sharing into equal groups, so a first step might be to actually share out counters and notice that there are some left over, or remaining.

She might have seen division shown as jumps on a number line, so in your example she could start at 38 and jump back in 3s to as near to 0 as possible, then count those jumps. She could also start on 0 and jump forwards in 3s. With both methods she will see the left over numbers are less than 3 so are a remainder.

She could do it with the bus stop method too, noticing that it's not exact, there are 2 left over or remaining.

For the fractions, using counters or a similar object and making thirds (sharing into 3 groups) and then counting 2 groups is a good first step. Drawings can help too.

Then she could think of it as a division and then a multiplication. So 12 divided by 3 is 4. 4 multiplied by 2 is 8. So two thirds of 12 is 8.

Hope that helps. I'd say, as a parent, helping her to find a way that makes sense to her is really useful. Then at school the teacher can focus on the more formal methods.

For fractions they have drawn circles or they draw 3 circles and they can either divide the 12 counters over the 3 circles or they put a dot in each circle and count, usually left to right, 1, 2, 3 until she has done 12 dots, then they count the dots or counters in 2 of the 3 circles. They need to identify how many circles they need to draw.

Times tables makes this much easier, I would start getting her to play with numbers, counting on in 2s from a number.

Bus stop method I think is year 4 but for something easy like 246 divided by 2 it is very easy for them to grasp. Actual ones used in class, the one above and 369 divided by 3.

For all of it in class, they write the example on the board and write the steps out so that for the next question they can walk themselves through it. Also the division one you have provided she can do the bus stop method and see that she has 2 left over.