Division with Remainders Learning Resources

Once students are proficient with basic multiplication facts and multi digit multiplication, they can be taught to divide those products into the factors they started with.

Just as multiplication determines the total number of items when given a number of groups of the same quantity, division takes a number and determines the number of times a number can occur within the original number.

A division problem has three main parts:

• The dividend is the larger number that will be divided up.
• The divisor is the number that the dividend is divided by.
• The quotient is the answer or how many times the divisor will go into the dividend.

When first learning division, students will discover that most problems do not cleanly divide. The divisor may not fit into the dividend a whole number of times. What is left is called a remainder. For example:

In this problem, the dividend is 23 and the divisor is 5. The goal is to determine how many times 5 will go into 23.	23 ÷ 5 =
At this point, the student will determine what number 5 can be multiplied by to get within 5 of the dividend without exceeding it. In this case, 4.	5 × 1 = 5 5 × 2 = 10 5 × 3 = 15 5 × 4 = 20 5 × 5 = 25
We now know that the closest we can get to the dividend without exceeding it with whole numbers is 20. This leaves a remainder of three.	23 × 5 = 4R3

Practicing division with the resources provided by Education.com above may help students understand the concepts of division and how to properly find the quotient and remainder if there is one.