Introducing Division (VI)

It is my experience that children really enjoy the division operation using subtraction. The most important reason according to me is the flexibility it offers. Children like the smaller and simpler steps they need to follow to arrive at the right answer. This gives them the confidence that their answer for division can never be wrong. At this stage teachers or parents whoever is teaching division to the beginners need to be patient and avoid immediately rushing to more complex problems.

While helping children in solving simpler division, the teacher may cue children for, say, instead of subtracting fewer groups of divisor from the dividend, could we subtract more at once. This way letting children to reduce the number of steps involved in division and finally encouraging them to jump to one step operation. Thus, bit by bit, children will learn to string together more complicated steps.

When the teacher plans for examples having two digits dividend and one digit divisor, children should be given freedom to experiment different ways to arrive at the answer of the problem of the type 12 ÷ 3. However, here the teacher can add some more information to children's concept of division. The new information to be given is that the process of finding the number of 3's in 12 is also called division. The mathematical statement in this case would be 3 × ? = 12. This is the inverse multiplication, and is written as 12 / 3 = 4.

It is always better to stick to the dividend equal to or less than thirty in the second step. When children handle the even division problems confidently introduce problems having dividend not divisible evenly by the divisor. Take for example, 8 ÷ 3. When children try to find out number of 3's in 8, they finally come to a step, having a number, from which more groups of divisor cannot be formed. This is shown below.
At this stage teacher can introduce the term remainder. The part of dividend that cannot be divided or shared equally is called the remainder.

I have seen that teachers usually differentiate between two types of division problems, viz. long division and short division problems. Many teachers usually start with short division problems first and encourage children to use inverse multiplication. According to me it is a mistake to regard long division and short division as two distinct rules. They are not so. There is, of course, only one rule, and that is long division. Short division is long division with more of the work done in the head and less on the paper; logically long division comes first.

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