Division – Basic Skills Math quiz for kids
Teaching basic division skill to kids
Division is an important math skill that helps you understand how to share things equally or figure out how many times one number goes into another number. It’s the opposite of multiplication, and it helps you find the answer to questions like, “How many groups of this number can we make with this many?” or “How much of this number is in each group?”
A simple way to think about division is to imagine that you have a certain number of items and you want to divide them evenly into a certain number of groups. For example, let’s say you have 12 apples and you want to divide them into 4 groups. To find out how many apples are in each group, you would use division.
The symbol for division is a forward slash (/) or a division sign (÷), and it is read as “divided by”. To divide 12 by 4, we write 12 ÷ 4 or 12/4. The number on the left side is called the dividend, and the number on the right side is called the divisor.
We can think of 12 ÷ 4 as asking “How many times does 4 go into 12?” or “How many groups of 4 can we make with 12?” The answer is 3, because 4 x 3 = 12. So there are 3 groups of 4 in 12.
When we divide and the answer is not a whole number, it’s called a quotient. A remainder is the number left over after you divide.
For example, let’s say you want to divide 19 apples among 5 people. You can’t divide them evenly, because 19 is not exactly divisible by 5, so you’ll have a remainder. You can find out how many apples each person gets by dividing 19 by 5 which is 3 with a remainder of 4. This means that each person will get 3 apples and 4 apples will be left over.
You can also think of the remainder as the amount left over, or the last item, if you could not divide the number entirely.
Another way to represent this is by using a remainder notation, like 19 ÷ 5 = 3 R 4, meaning that 19 divided by 5 is equal to 3 with a remainder of 4.
When the divisor is smaller than the dividend, and there is no remainder, we call the quotient a whole number. When the divisor is larger than the dividend, we get a quotient of 0 with a remainder equal to the dividend. For example, 5 ÷ 8 = 0 R 5
Division can also be done using repeated subtraction. For example, if you have 12 apples and you want to divide them into 4 groups, you can keep subtracting 4 from 12 until you can’t subtract anymore. The number of times you were able to subtract is the quotient. In this example, you can subtract 4 from 12 three times, so the quotient is 3.
You can also use a number line to help you divide. Let’s say you want to divide 7 by 3. You can use a number line and start counting by 3s from 0 up to 7. The first 3 will be 3, the next 3 will be 6 and the last one will be 9. You will notice that 9 is greater than 7, so we stopped counting at the last 3 before 9. The quotient is 2.
Division is a really important math skill that you’ll use throughout your life. It’s used to help you figure out how much of something you have, how much you’ll get when you share something, and how many of something you can make with a certain number.