The Teachers’ Lounge: Place Value and Division is one of five
units in the Contexts for Learning Mathematics’ Investigating
Multiplication and Division (3–5) The focus of this unit is
division. It begins with the story of a teacher noticing a
service person in the teachers’ lounge fill two different
vending machines with beverages. In the first machine, there are
bottles of water only. The machine holds 156 bottles of water
when full and the teacher wonders how many six-packs that might
be. The second problem involves the juice machine. It also holds
156 bottles when full, but the bottles are partitioned into six
columns because there are six different flavors of juice. The
teacher wonders how many there are of each flavor. Although most
students do not realize it at the start, the two problems are
related. The first problem is a quotative division situation—
the amount in each group is known, the number of groups is not.
The second problem is a partitive division situation— the number
of groups is known, the