Division Word Problems: Share the Fruits Out Equally

Twenty persimmons sit in two neat rows above five empty dashed boxes. That picture is the whole method of this 3rd grade word-problems page: the fruits are all there, the boxes are all there, and nothing is in them yet. Ben sorts the persimmons equally into 5 groups and the child works out how many land in each; below, Mia lines 10 papayas up over 2 empty boxes and the question is how many go in each row. A dot grid, a dashed answer box and a handwriting line for the answer sentence finish each card.

This is sharing division, the kind where the number of groups is known and the size of each group is not. Children meet it first because it matches something they have done since they were three, dealing things out one at a time until they run out, and the empty boxes invite exactly that. Dealing is slow but it is not a trick; it produces the right answer and it shows the child why the answer is a group size. The step from there is noticing that a fair deal can be predicted, that twenty into five must be four because five fours are twenty, which is where the multiplication facts come back in.

Print the PDF free and let the child tally into the boxes with pencil dots rather than drawing whole fruits, which keeps the dealing quick enough to stay useful. If the deal comes out uneven, the count of the original picture is usually where it went wrong. The making groups page is the other kind of division, where the group size is given and the number of groups has to be found, and the two ways page prints one of each so they can be compared. The multiplication word problems page is the one to secure first.