Help your class become short division experts with this ‘Short Division’ scheme of work for Year 5. Not only will children have plenty of opportunities to perfect the short division process, but they will also learn to apply it in a variety of problem-solving contexts.

This scheme of work contains five complete lessons, each containing a detailed lesson plan, a set of slides, activity ideas and a range of printable resources. All these great resources will make short work of your Maths planning for the week!

Using Known Facts

The first lesson in this series will help your class hone their mental skills as they solve a variety of calculations mentally using known multiplication and division facts. including multiplying and dividing by powers of 10, and multiplying by 9, 11, 50 and 25. The slides recap some of the handy methods they can employ to calculate mentally. There are then some games for their independent learning that will encourage rapid recall of multiplication and division facts.

The Method

Starting with comparing the chunking and short division methods, this lesson goes on to recap how the short division method works. They will go through several calculations together on the slides, explaining each step of the process, before having a go independently. They can practise short division independently yet in a group activity, or solve some missing number problems.

Division Problems

Now that your class have had a chance to practise the short division method, they can have a go at using it in the context of word problems. The slides go through a variety of word problems for the children to solve, some of which don’t include division to ensure that they are reading and understanding the questions. After some practice altogether, they can then either solve word problem crosswords or carry out a short division challenge.

Scaling by Simple Fractions

After a quick division warm-up, your class will explore how to solve problems involving scaling by simple fractions. The slides challenge your class to work out the height of different characters through questions such as, ‘Max is 1855 mm tall. Emma is a fifth shorter than Max. How tall is Emma?’ The questions become increasingly challenging and there is also the chance to find out some celebrity heights too!

Multi-Step Problems

This challenging lesson asks your class to solve a variety of multi-step word problems drawing on their knowledge of short division and other methods. The questions involve all four operations and children are challenged to think carefully about each step of the problem-solving process as they go through each question. There is also the opportunity for children to create some word problems of their own based on a given multi-step calculation.