Division Activities for Kids

Overview of Elementary Division

Your child will be introduced to division in the third grade. At this grade level, your child will learn to multiply and divide within 100 to solve multi-step word problems. Your child will also be learning how to determine an unknown number in a division number sentence. It is important for third graders to fully understand the division process so that they will be able to interpret the quotient of a division problem. In later elementary grades, your child will be working with larger dividends and divisors to divide through 1,000.

Division Pyramids

This activity is focused on helping your child practice multiplication facts in a fun way! For this activity, aces are worth one point, jacks are worth ten, queens are worth 12 and kings are worth 14. Use 15 cards from a deck of cards and lay them out in the shape of a pyramid.

Players will take turns removing cards from the bottom of the pyramid by dividing them. For instance, if a player chooses a jack and a two card from the bottom row of the pyramid, he or she would say '10 ÷ 2 = 5.' If a player chooses two cards and divides them incorrectly, then he or she must leave the cards in the pyramid. More advanced students can create a division problem using three cards instead of two. The player with the most cards at the end of the game wins!

Bags of Division

For this division activity, you will need four brown paper bags and four different items, such as dry beans or paper clips. Each bag should have a different number of items inside. Have your child choose one of the bags and empty out the contents.

Ask your child to model division facts by separating the items from the bag into groups of his or her choosing. For example, if a bag has 16 paper clips, your child could sort them into two groups of eight, showing 16 ÷ 2 = 8 or 16 ÷ 8 = 2. Encourage your child to show different ways that this number of items can be divided and to record each division with a number sentence. When your child has exhausted all the variations for one bag, he or she should move on to the next.