Ms. Ramiro's third-grade class is beginning to learn about division. She introduced the division problem below by saying, "Please work with your partner to write a sharing-division word problem. Your problem should go with the number sentence '25 ÷ 10 = ?' Try not to have food in your problem! Then, solve your problem."

Anna: Sharing division -- is that like the cookies problems? Like, 25 cookies for 10 people, how much is each person's fair share?
Kai: I think so, but we can't use food.

Anna: We could do baseball cards.
Kai: No, who wants to share baseball cards? I just trade them and collect them -- and besides, some are worth more than others. What about prize tickets? What if a team of 10 kids wins 25 tickets to the movies, and they decide to share them equally?

Anna: That's good. What would the answer be?
Kai: Uh, I'll make a box for each kid's tickets, that's 10 boxes. If we give them two each, that gives out 20 tickets. (She writes "2" in each box, and counts by twos to 20.) What about the five more tickets?

Anna: It would be dumb to tear them in half. You can't go to the movies with half a ticket.
Kai: Why would you tear them?

Anna: Five tickets isn't enough to give them one more each. But, there's enough to give one-half to each, like we did in some of the cookies problems.
Kai: I know! What if the team wins a prize of 25 dollars?

Anna: They could each have two dollars -- look at our work on the tickets problem. They would use up 20 dollars that way. What about the other five dollars?
Kai: We could give them some dimes or quarters.

Anna: Why don't we try it like in the cookies problems and give half a dollar to each kid? If you break five dollars in half, you get 10 half-dollars.
Kai: Yeah, they each get two and a half dollars.

  Reflect on the sharing-division word problem