Writing Remainders In Three Ways

Hi, I'm Zoe and in this video we're going to be looking at presenting a remainder in three different ways. Not every division divides exactly and because of this, what is left over we call a remainder. Now in the Year 6 curriculum, it stresses the importance of pupils being able to write this remainder as a number, as a fraction and as a decimal, depending on the context of the question. So let's get ourselves a remainder. We've got the division on the board, 539 divided by four. I know it's going to have a remainder because this is an odd number and we're sharing it by four. Let's go through our bus stop method. Four into five goes once, remainder one. Four into 13 goes three times. Remainder one and four into 19 goes four times. And we're left with three. First way of writing it, remainder three. This is leaving it as a number. This is really useful in the context of dividing people into groups. So if you're dividing 539 people into groups of four, we'd have 134 groups of four and one group that had three people in it. So that's our first way of writing it. 134 remain to three. Okay, our next way we're going to write it as a fraction. We've still got a remainder of three that hasn't changed, but it's three out of four. So again, writing that three out of four gives us our fraction three quarters. So 134 and three quarters is our answer. This is really useful for questions for things that can be divided into fractions easily. Say cakes, pizzas, for example, you can get three quarters of a chocolate bar. So that's our fractions. It's a nice fraction. 134¾. Hopefully your year six pupils will recognise straight away that is the same as 0.75 as a decimal. And we'll be able to write 0.75 without too much input. However, let's say it wasn't three quarters. We're going to have to find another way of doing this. Hopefully their place value is secure at this point. And that by putting a decimal point and a zero placeholder that has not changed the value of that number and they understand that. So 539.0 is still the same as 539. Using our remainder, our remainder becomes from 3 ones, 30/10. So 4 into 30 goes 7 times, we have a remainder of 2, another placeholder and our 2 goes there. 4 into 20 goes 5 times. There's our decimal. Now, that is really useful for problems involving money, for example, 134 pounds 75 pence. So there we have it, three different ways of presenting our remainder and the context they might use them in. Pupils should be given as much opportunity when doing divisions to present them in those three ways. And there we have it, three different ways of presenting a remainder.