Division

The children have been learning all about division over the past few weeks. There are two ways that children can divide and the method they choose will depend on the question that they are faced with.

The first is division by sharing. This is your classic '10 cookies are shared between Sam and Bob. How many will each person get?' To solve this, your child has been taught to draw a circle for each person / thing you're sharing with and to share the correct number of dots, cubes, pictures etc between them. The working for this question would look like this...

The second way to divide is by grouping. In this case, a question won't tell you how many people / things to share between. It may ask something like '20 balls need sorting into bags of 5. How many bags will you need?' Where they don't have an amount given to share between, what your child has been taught to do is to make groups (in this case of 5) until they reach the end number (in this case 20). Rather than drawing the circles first, they would do them last to count how many groups they have created in total. You can see here, the answer would be 'you need 4 bags.'

The following links are fab for generating questions for both division by sharing and division by grouping and allow you to change the numbers in the question. It also lets you play with making groups or sharing and has pictures too. We have enjoyed using it in class and you may like to have a try at home.

This is for division by sharing.

This is for division by grouping.

I would suggest choosing one method to focus on at a time, so as to not cause confusion. 

Here we are using some objects in class to work on our division skills.