Video Transcript
There are 12 fish. There are what fish in each
bowl. There are what bowls. Fill in the blank: 12 divided by
three equals what.
Our question begins by telling us
that there are 12 fish. Doesn’t look like there are 12
fish. Each bowl doesn’t have very many
fish in it at all. Where are the 12 fish? Well, it seems there were 12 fish
to begin with, but they’ve been split up or shared out between different bowls. This looks like it’s going to be a
question all about division, splitting up or sharing an amount of objects. Our next sentence gives us a little
clue as to what’s happened. There are what fish in each
bowl. If we look at the fish bowls, we
can see that they all contain the same number of fish. The fish have been divided into
equal groups. We can see that there are three
fish in each bowl.
The next sentence we need to
complete is the number of bowls. There are how many bowls. There are four bowls, aren’t
there? We can write what’s going on here
as a number sentence. And this is the last blank that
we’re asked to fill in. Now, let’s have a look at this
number sentence to see if we understand it. It begins with the number 12. What does the number 12 represent
in this situation? It’s the amount we started
with. We had 12 fish to begin with.
And what happened to those 12
fish? They were shared out so that there
were three fish in each bowl. That’s why we use the division
symbol here, two dots with a line in between. We’ve divided the amount we started
with. And we’ve divided, as we’ve said,
by three. Three is the number that we wanted
in each group or in each bowl. Now, the answer to our number
sentence is going to be the number of groups that we could make. In other words, the number of
bowls. If we start with an amount and we
divide it so that we have an equal number in each group, the answer will be the
number of groups that we can make.
There were 12 fish to begin
with. There are three fish in each
bowl. There are four bowls. 12 divided by three equals
four. The missing numbers are three,
four, and four.
