Brushing Up On Division (1961)

The film is an educational piece focusing on teaching division concepts, particularly emphasizing the importance of understanding place value and multiplication facts. It features a character, Bob, who struggles with division, receiving guidance from Linda to improve his understanding.

Initially, Bob repeatedly gets different answers for the same division problem due to his shaky grasp of place value and multiplication facts. Linda takes Bob through the basics of division using simple examples, such as dividing 12 by 3, illustrating the process with visuals like groups of squares to explain the concepts of the dividend, divisor, and quotient. She emphasizes that division is essentially the reverse of multiplication.

The film progresses to more complex examples, including uneven division, such as dividing 163 by 5. It showcases how to handle remainders and how to use multiplication to check division results. This methodical approach helps Bob understand how to break down a number based on its place values (hundreds, tens, ones) and how to apply these concepts to find how many groups of a certain size can be made from a number.

Towards the end, the application of division in real-world scenarios is demonstrated using an example involving distributing concert tickets among school rooms, which ties in the relevance of mastering division for practical tasks. The film concludes with a reminder of the continuous need for practicing division to enhance proficiency, inviting the viewers to assess and improve their own division skills.

We digitized and uploaded this film from the A/V Geeks 16mm Archive. Email us at footage@avgeeks.com if you have questions about the footage and are interested in using it in your project.