Understanding Why 3 Divided by 5 Equals 0.6 for 11-Year-Olds

To understand why 3 divided by 5 equals 0.6, we can break it down into simple steps.

1. Understanding Division: Division is like sharing something equally. When we say 3 divided by 5, we are trying to find out how much each of the 5 parts would get if we share 3 equally.
2. Setting Up the Problem: We write this as a fraction: rac{3}{5}. This means we are dividing 3 into 5 equal parts.
3. Making it Easier to Understand: If it helps, we can think about how many times 5 fits into 3. Since 5 is greater than 3, we see that it fits 0 times if we’re thinking of whole parts.
4. Finding the Decimal: To find out how we can divide it into smaller parts, we can use decimal points. We also remember that dividing by 5 is the same as multiplying by 0.2 (because 1 divided by 5 equals 0.2).
5. Performing the Division: So, we can perform the division by making 3 into a decimal. We can say,:

3 = 3.0 (adding a decimal)

6. Now we divide 3.0 by 5. This helps us see that when we split 3.0 into 5 parts, we will get:

3.0 ÷ 5 = 0.6

7. Understanding the Result: This means that each of the 5 parts has 0.6 of the original 3. So, if you had 3 objects and shared them among 5 people, each person would get 0.6 of an object.

To summarize, 3 divided by 5 equals 0.6 because we are trying to share 3 equally among 5 parts, which gives us a decimal of 0.6 for each part.