Long Division is helpful when you have to divide a large quantity of something into equal amounts.
Let’s say you just bought a bag of strawberry seeds. The bag contains 125 seeds. The instructions say to plant three seeds per seed hole. How many holes do you need to make and will there be any seeds left over.
To solve this problem we will use long division with remainders, remainders tell you how many of something are left over.
Step 1. Write 3 divided into 125.
Step 2. Does 3 go into 1? No, it needs a bigger number.
Step 3. Does 3 go into 12? Yes, 4 times. 3 x 4 = 12, subtract this from the first two digits of 125.
Step 4. Bring the 5 down. How many times does 3 go into 5? 1 time. 3 x 1 = 3. Subtract 3 from 5.
Step 5. We cannot fit 3 into 2 so we say the remainder is 2. 125 divided by 3 is 41 with remainder 2.
That means we can make 41 holes with 3 seeds each and we can make an additional hole with the remaining seeds which are 2 seeds.
