Share It Out: What Is Left Over?

Fruit pictures fill the four cards of this 3rd grade sharing page: seventeen pomegranates, twenty lemons, fifteen blueberries and nine cherries, each pile with its division printed beside it — 17 ÷ 3, 20 ÷ 3, 15 ÷ 2, 9 ÷ 4. Under each pile stands a row of empty white boxes, as many as the divisor, and at the end of the row a smaller dashed box labelled left over. The child deals the pile out one picture at a time, a tally in each box in turn, until there are too few left to give every box one more; those go in the left-over box. Then they write how many each box got and the remainder, R.

This is sharing rather than grouping — the other way to read the same division. On the base page 17 ÷ 3 is how many threes fit in 17; here it is 17 fruits shared between 3 boxes, and the answer is what one box holds. Both give 5 R 2, and putting the two pages side by side is the clearest way to show it. The dashed left-over box is the point of the page: the remainder has a home, it is the fruit that could not be shared, and a child who tries to squeeze a sixth fruit into one box has found out what the remainder means.

One sheet; the piles stay under twenty so the dealing does not drag, and the divisors are 2, 3 and 4 on this sheet. The page carries the family's fruits theme where the base page carries animals. Follow it with the practice-rows page once the boxes are no longer needed, and use the number-line page for children who see sharing more easily as hopping back.