Hi and welcome to Math Antics.

In this video lesson, we’re gonna learn the basics of division. And if you really understand these basics,

then it’ll make it much easier learning how to do ‘long division’ which is the subject of our next video.

Okay, so here’s how basic division works. You get a problem like this one: 9 divided by 3,

which means you have a total of 9 and you want to divide it into 3 equal groups.

And if you can remember that 9 is an answer to one of the multiplication facts,

or that it’s an answer on the multiplication table,

then you can see that since 3 × 3 is 9, then 9 divided by 3 is 3. It’s that simple!

Well… at least it WAS that simple when you learned about the fact families.

Now it’s gonna get a little bit tricky because most division problems aren’t quite this easy,

like this one: 9 divided by 4

The trouble here is that 9 and 4 aren’t part of a fact family,

so you can’t just find the answer on the multiplication table.

That’s because 9 is not a multiple of 4. There’s no whole number that you can multiply 4 by and end up with 9.

That means that 9 can’t be divided equally into 4 groups without having something left over.

Like if you had 9 cookies and 4 kids, each kid could have 2 cookies but there would be 1 left over.

And in division, that left over amount is called a “remainder”.

So the answer to 9 divided by 4 is 2 with a remainder of 1.

Alright, so it’s not that hard to figure out a simple division problem when you have a picture like this,

but what about when we just have numbers. To do that, we use a special division procedure.

Up until now, you probably have used this division symbol the most.

It works well for very simple division problems, like the ones in our fact families.

But, now that we’re gonna be doing some harder problems, we need a new division symbol… this one…

This division symbol is special, because it’s almost like a stage that will help us solve our division problem.

And there’s three special areas of this stage where the three main parts (or characters) of our division problem will go.

The first area is here under the long horizontal line on our division symbol.

This is the area where we put the number that we will be dividing up.

The fancy math term for this is the “dividend”.

Most of the time, the biggest number will go here, because we usually start with a big amount and want to divide it into smaller groups.

The second area is out in front of the curved part of the division symbol.

This is the area where we put the number we will be dividing BY.

The math term for that is the “divisor”.

In other words, this number will tell us how many groups we will be dividing our big amount into.

And the third area is up above the horizontal line.

This is where our answer will go, once we figure out what the answer is.

The answer to a division problem is called the “quotient”.

The answer tells us how many we will end up with in each group.

So whenever you have a complicated division problem to do, the first step is to re-write your problem in this form.

If you have 9 divided by 4 like this, you put the ‘9’ down here (that’s the number we’re dividing UP)