We have been thinking about multiplication and division structures this week. We started with the problem of sharing 12 sweets between two people (partitive division). We drew pictures to show how we did this, for example:

We compared this with division as grouping (quotitive division), for example, I have 12 sweets that I want to put into bags of 2, how many bags do I need?

The children used arrays to draw the division structures and very quickly understood the difference between them and how they link to the multiplication facts we have been working on. Some children went on to explore numbers that did not divide exactly and began to think about remainders.

We will be continuing with our work on multiplying and dividing in the new year, so keep up the good work with practising the times tables facts at home. We will be using them a lot over the coming weeks!