Teaching your children division in math - the intuitive way

Adding is usually the first artihmetic tool children can learn. Already very early they will have a sense of adding like objects and counting .. counting is an effect of adding (not vice versa if you ask me). Then subtraktion and multiplikation will come later but about the same time... maybe around the age of 7-9. Multiplikation is just a more advanced way of conceptualizing addition of like numbers ...

Ex ... 2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2+2 = (1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1) x 2 = 11 x 2

The last of the four old big ones is division. One way to illustrate how to do division, is by bringing in the old egyptian method - which I believe it is (remember it from some documentary some years back) into play.

Think of a number of like objects that can easily be divided, like loafs of bread, for the numerator. Then think of a number of persons to represent the denominator

a / b = numerator / denominator = (number of loafs of bread) / (number of people) ... ex 3 / 7

Now what you do then is to illustrate that if you slice up each of the loaves of bread, in as many slices as there are people and then distribute the slices equally after that ... then all persons will have the same amount of bread and each person will end up with three slices of one seventh of a bread.

or 1/7 + 1/7 + 1/7 = 1/7 x (1+1+1) = 3 / 7

This is the general technique that can alwas be used.
But a particular case is when a number of loafs and a number of people are "divisible" (only possible when number of loafs are at least the same number as the number of people), then you do not need to bring out the bread-knife :-)

Happy math teaching :-)