Doing Long Division

Make Sure Your Child Can Do Division By Hand

You should maximize your practice with traditional division problems (i.e., 12 ÷ 3 = 4) so that you can know them off of the “top of your head” and you should work to do division by hand, because you will need this skill.

When you divide something among people, let’s say money, that division doesn’t always have to be distributed in nice, neat whole numbers. Sometimes decimals will come into play and we will need to do division by hand—not always with a calculator. If you don’t know how to do certain things by hand, even when you use a calculator, you may not be sure if the problem is right, if you don’t know how to do in fundamentally.

Let’s say I had $147 that I needed to divide among 4 people. Well, I wouldn’t be able to, necessarily, do the exact division in my head, but I should be able to work this out by hand really quickly to determine the amount to give each person.

Four (4) goes into 14, 3 times—with 2 left over. If I bring down the 7, I would divide 4 into 27, which would go into that 6 with 3 left over. I would eventually get an answer of 36.75 — I would give each person $36.75.

Let’s look at a simpler example.

Long division allows us to work through a division problem and find out an answer without having to use a calculator, all the time. This skill we be useful in school and in life.

We can even go into the realm of decimals with long division and get specific if we need to be.

Let’s look at our first example, again.