Division by Chunking

[babasheep]

Teachers - I am a older mother so Chunking is new to me. I don’t understand why my dc’s school so keen on using Chunking rather than long division? As my dc who is very good at timetable got very confused. My dc said her school doesn’t do much long division. Children at her table are encouraged to use Chunking all the times. Why? I wonder?

I think the rational behind chunking is that it is easier to do it in your head. And most of maths at primary level is aimed at mental arithmetic.
It is based on working from numbers you know - taking those away and seeing what you have left.

this explains it well.

Many primary maths methods are ok in themselves - but very difficult to extend to something more difficult - number lines fall apart when you try and work with 635733 - 55344 etc.

Being a cynic it seems to me primary schools aim to get to the KS2 level - and have little interest in where it goes after that. That is the fault of the curriculum designers rather than the schools.

Lots of children can learn a process, but have no idea about why they have the answer they have, or how to tell if they've made a mistake. I use the analogy of having a function machine- you stick the problem in, turn the handle and a result comes out, but you can't see what's happened inside nor understand why.

It's about having an instrumental or relational understanding of number- some children naturally 'see' relationships between numbers, which is great. These are the children who are going to spot a mistake. Most children don't have that eye for maths, and need numerous methods to help them. Chunking helps children to understand the true value of a number.

I was good at maths but hated long division for some reason and worked out my own way of doing it quickly and accurately. I now find out it has a name - chunking!

DS1 learnt it in Year 4 I think then moved onto long short division and now does long division. He gets it because chunking helped his understanding. I can now see that's what I was missing as a child but tbh I still chunk.

DS is good at maths too, and learning a variety of methods has kept him happy playing around with numbers to find things out which I'd say is a good thing.

Chunking can really help with long division where carrying the remainder makes no difference to the question e.g.

155 divided by 16.