Lesson 16

The purpose of this lesson is for students to make sense of base-ten representations for division.

In the previous lesson, students applied their understanding from grade 3 to divide two- and three-digit numbers by one-digit divisors. Students worked with dividends slightly beyond 100 and represented their thinking in a way that made sense to them.

In this lesson, students work with larger dividends and represent problems with base-ten blocks. This representation emphasizes place value, which supports the work with division in this section. Students are asked to represent their work with base-ten blocks on paper, but that is not the emphasis of this lesson. In the next lesson, students will make sense of and use base-ten diagrams. In future lessons, they will be able to choose a representation and method that makes sense to them as they go deeper into division work.

• Each group of 3–4 students needs a set of base-ten blocks that includes 4 hundreds blocks, 10 ten blocks, and 25 ones blocks.

What surprised you about how students used base-ten blocks to find the value of quotients? How might you use this in tomorrow’s lesson?