Stamp Game Division
Division with the stamp game is fair sharing: the stamps are dealt out to skittles, one round at a time, biggest stamps first, trading down whenever a fair round is impossible. The answer is what one skittle receives — and whatever cannot be shared fairly is the remainder.
Materials
- The stamp game (or homemade cardstock stamps)
- Two to nine skittles — green pegs if you have them, otherwise LEGO people, buttons, or coins to stand for the sharers
- Slips of paper with division problems
- Pencil and paper
No materials at home? Use the virtual Stamp Game.
Before this lesson
Aims
Direct
- To divide a multi-digit number by a single digit through equal sharing
- To understand the quotient as one sharer’s portion and the remainder as what cannot be shared fairly
Indirect
- Preparation for long division and, later, racks and tubes
- Feeling why division starts with the largest place while the other operations start with the units
Presentation
- 1 Write 725 ÷ 3 on a slip. Stand three skittles in a row, well spaced.Seven hundred twenty-five, shared fairly among three. Fair means everyone gets exactly the same.
- 2 Your child builds 725 in stamps: seven 100s, two 10s, five 1s.
- 3 Begin with the biggest stamps. Give each skittle one 100 — a fair round. Do it again.One for you, one for you, one for you. Everyone got the same.
- 4 One 100 is left — not enough to give every skittle one.I cannot give this hundred to everyone fairly. So we change it for ten tens.
- 5 Trade the last 100 for ten 10s (now twelve tens) and deal them out in rounds: each skittle receives four.
- 6 Deal the five units: one round of one each, and two units are left over.Two units left, and I cannot share two fairly among three. They are the remainder — they stay on the table.
- 7 Read one skittle’s share: 2 hundreds, 4 tens, 1 unit.In division, the answer is what one person gets: 725 divided by 3 is 241, remainder 2.
- 8 For an older child, check on paper: 241 × 3 + 2 brings back 725.
Points of interest
- Dealing starts with the thousands or hundreds — the opposite of addition and subtraction, which start with the units
- Every skittle’s row must look exactly the same — unfairness is visible at a glance
- The remainder: stamps that simply cannot be shared, always fewer than the number of skittles
Control of error
- A short round exposes itself — someone would be left out, so the round cannot be dealt
- The rows in front of the skittles must match exactly; any difference means a dealing mistake
- The remainder must always be smaller than the number of skittles — if not, another round is possible
- On the virtual material, Check confirms fair shares, the quotient, and the remainder column by column
Vocabulary
- divide (share fairly)
- dividend (what is shared)
- divisor (how many sharers)
- quotient (one sharer’s portion)
- remainder
- skittle
Variations
- Problems that come out even (no remainder) and problems that do not — sort which is which
- Share the same dividend among 2, then 4, then 8 skittles and compare the portions
Extensions
- Check every division by multiplying back and adding the remainder
- Story problems: 725 marbles shared among 3 cousins — how many each, and how many left in the bag?
Follow-up work (pencil & paper)
- Print division problems (dividend up to four digits, single-digit divisor). Your child solves each with stamps and skittles, recording the quotient and the remainder.Printable: Multi-Digit Operations
- Your child writes each finished problem as a checking sentence in pencil: quotient × divisor + remainder = dividend.
What comes next
With all four operations done in symbols, your child is ready for the Introduction to the Small Bead Frame, where place value climbs onto wires and written notation takes another step toward paper-only arithmetic.
Next in this strand: Introduction to the Small Bead Frame