I am the smartest woman alive!
At least, that's how it feels when I successfully teach a child long division.
I was worried, because when our beloved Fred introduced long division this morning, Tuna's face contorted and she promptly blurted out, "This is hard."
I asked her how she knew it was hard when we hadn't covered it yet.
She told me she'd seen a friend doing it at school.
"Well, you haven't seen Mama do it yet, and I say it's really easy!"
Bay chimed in that she, too, found it easy.
I asked Tuna to please hang in with me and give it a chance. We read our Life of Fred chapter, but her scared math face didn't leave.
So, I took a piece of paper and a marker to the kitchen counter (seems to be her preferred thinking spot lately) and asked her a question.
"Does McDonald's sell burgers?"
She looked at me as though I'd grown a new head, and answered, "Yes, why?"
So I wrote for her:
Divide
Multiply
Subtract
Bring Down
D
M
S
B
Does
McDonald's
Sell
Burgers
She giggled, and I explained to her that those are the only steps she needed to remember to do long division.
And then, I showed her a few examples with numbers into the millions, so she could see that no matter the size of the number, the steps are always the same, and they are always broken down into simple problems.
So she did a few herself. Occasionally, she would start to write the her numbers in the wrong spots, but that will come with practice.
The point is, she understands.
And so, in typical silly Tuna style that comes about whenever the light bulb turns on, she came up with her own mnemonic phrase:
Derpy
Men
Suffer
Baldness
...and escaped to the third floor to play Minecraft, giggling all the way.
