Video Transcript
Three friends have 24 coins. We can draw a bar model to show how
many coins each one has. How many coins does each one
have?
Did you notice as we read this
problem, there are no operation symbols to tell us what to do? We can’t see a plus or a takeaway
sign or a multiplication or division symbol. How are we going to work out what
to do? Well, the clue is in the pictures
and also in our second sentence where it tells us that we can draw a bar model. Bar models are so useful; they help
us to understand what we need to do to solve a problem. So let’s start at the beginning and
see how this particular bar model can help us here.
In the first sentence, we’re given
two pieces of information with numbers in them. We’re told that three friends have
24 coins. And we’re shown a picture of those
24 coins. I wonder why the coins have been
drawn in a long strip like this. Well, it’s because we can draw a
bar model to help us. Did you notice that the bar in the
bar model is exactly the same length as our strip of coins? It represents the whole amount. And we know this because it’s
labeled with the number 24. Now, what else do we know about
this whole amount of 24 coins? We know that the number of friends
that have these coins is three. And although the question doesn’t
tell us, we do know that each friend must have the same amount of coins. This is because the whole bar has
been split into three equal parts.
Now, our question asks us how many
coins does each of the three friends have. And by looking at the bar model, we
now know what we need to do. We need to start with 24 and divide
it into three equal groups. And our answer is going to be the
number of coins that there are in each group. The bar model has helped us to see
that this is a division problem. What do we get if we divide 24 by
three? We could take 24 counters to
represent our 24 coins and then share them out into three equal groups. Let’s put one in each group. Two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight. 24 divided by three equals
eight.
And you know we can show this using
the picture of the coins too. If we draw a dotted line up from
each of our three equal bars, we can see that there are eight coins in each
part. We could even label our bar model
to show this. The bar model helped us to
understand what we needed to do to solve the problem. If three friends have 24 coins, to
find out how many coins each one has, as long as they’re equal amounts, we need to
divide 24 by three. And 24 divided by three equals
eight. Each of the friends has eight
coins.
