Chunking What..?
My daughter came home with some maths homework yesterday and we sat down to do it earlier on tonight. Now the way they teach things at school is totally different to the way they did it when I was there, so I was a little confused myself and was grateful for her teacher showing us on Thursday when there was a meeting outlining this years curriculum!
Apparently the way for doing division sums is now known as chunking (?) whereas I learnt to do long division, and as for hubby, I dunno, maybe he used an abacus or rune stones or something! Anyhow, you set it out as normal then set about chunking.
32/945 (why doesn't my keyboard contain a divide symbol??)
You try and work out how many times 32 will go into 945, usually starting with 10s, so 10x32=320, will it go another 10? Yes, 640. Will it go another 10? No.
945
640-
305
Ok, so can you take another 10 32s out of 305? No. 5? 5x32=160. Yes. 7? 224, yes. 8? 256, yes. 9? 288, yes.
305
288-
017
Can you take another 32 from 17? No, so you have a remainder of 17. Now we add up all the times 32 went into 945.
10+10+9=29r17.
It took a while for me to understand it but I got it eventually and so did my daughter after almost an hour and a half!
I'm beginning to wonder who the homework is for these days and WHY they've changed the methods of doing such things?! Surely they don't expect all parents to be able to know how things are done these days without being shown first! My daughter's teacher has said that the homework is ALWAYS something they've done in class time, but if the child doesn't understand it during class time, then ultimately, one or both parents take on a new role of teacher to try and help them understand it. Already this term I've had to send her to school with a note stating that she didn't know what to do and neither did we, so are they making it too complicated these days or are we just too thick to understand..? 
Apparently the way for doing division sums is now known as chunking (?) whereas I learnt to do long division, and as for hubby, I dunno, maybe he used an abacus or rune stones or something! Anyhow, you set it out as normal then set about chunking.
32/945 (why doesn't my keyboard contain a divide symbol??)
You try and work out how many times 32 will go into 945, usually starting with 10s, so 10x32=320, will it go another 10? Yes, 640. Will it go another 10? No.
945
640-
305
Ok, so can you take another 10 32s out of 305? No. 5? 5x32=160. Yes. 7? 224, yes. 8? 256, yes. 9? 288, yes.
305
288-
017
Can you take another 32 from 17? No, so you have a remainder of 17. Now we add up all the times 32 went into 945.
10+10+9=29r17.
It took a while for me to understand it but I got it eventually and so did my daughter after almost an hour and a half!
I'm beginning to wonder who the homework is for these days and WHY they've changed the methods of doing such things?! Surely they don't expect all parents to be able to know how things are done these days without being shown first! My daughter's teacher has said that the homework is ALWAYS something they've done in class time, but if the child doesn't understand it during class time, then ultimately, one or both parents take on a new role of teacher to try and help them understand it. Already this term I've had to send her to school with a note stating that she didn't know what to do and neither did we, so are they making it too complicated these days or are we just too thick to understand..?
posted by Ailsa @ 11:27 pm
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