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Boxes of Markers is a student sheet designed to introduce the idea of portioning items evenly as a form of division. Many students simply skip count by the number of students , in this case 23, in order to find out how many groups of 23 can be made by multiples of 70 markers. It might look like 23, 46, 69;at which point the kids realize that they have run out of markers. Most can see that each "skip count" represents a student with a marker. So, three skip counts would equal 3 markers per student.

The work above is from a student that immediately recognized this as a division problem that could be solved using easy multiples of 23 until the number of markers was exhausted. This really is the goal of this type of exercise, as it makes division and multiplication forever seen as related activities. Once the student that did this work adds sentences that explain the numerical answers, the work will be at standard to say the least!