Before beginning actual division exercises, games and activities, it is beneficial to go over the terms of division first. Students should be able to identify and explain the terms divisor, dividend and quotient. For an activity, write a division problem and its answer on the white board. Ask the students to raise their hands if they know which number is which. Say, "the divisor" and call on a student for the answer. The activity should be repeated until the majority have the terminology down.
For young children learning division for the first time, a visual explanation is often the best strategy to introduce the concept. Physical division can be done by making a division "kit" for each student, with 10 dry cupcake wrappers and 100 small objects: pennies, dry beans, buttons, plastic blocks or disks. The cupcake wrappers represent the divisor and the small objects represent the dividend. For the equation eight divided by two, the students should place two cupcake wrappers in front of them and count out eight small pennies or beans. The students then divide the pennies equally among the cupcake wrappers. Once the pennies are divided, the student counts how many fit in each cup. For eight divided by two, each cup will contain four pennies. After each division, the students should write down the problem and the answer.
The classic method for learning long division is taught through the method of divide, multiply, subtract, bring-down. When teaching the method of long division and giving examples, an activity to help the students remember is to either sing the method in a song or create an acronym for DMSB, such as don't make salty brownies or something that will catch the students' attention and help them remember.
An alternate activity to long division is number deconstruction, which at first can be easier for students to work with when using large numbers. Number deconstruction breaks down a large number, such as 468 into the numbers 400 plus 60 plus 8, and divides each deconstructed number by the divisor. If the divisor is 4, the student must divide 400 by 4, 60 by 4 and 8 by 4 and combine the results to find the quotient for the original problem. 100 plus 15 plus 2 equals 117, the answer to 468 divided by 4.
Once students are fairly confident with their division skills, competition games can be played in the classroom for additional practice and to boost students' confidence with their skills. For division bingo, the teacher writes a division problem on the board and the students must solve it and place a marker over the answer on their bingo board. As such, problems can only have answers of one through ten. To practice dividing problems in your head, partner games can be played with division problems placed on cards. Each player takes turns flipping over cards and answering the problem without using a pen and paper; the opponent student checks the answer by using a calculator. If the answer is correct, the student gets a point. By the end of the game, the student with the most points wins. If large numbers are used, a pencil and paper will be required.