Dividing a decimal by a whole number with fraction models

in this video we're going to try to figure out what four tenths divided by five is so pause this video and see if you can think about it before we work through together or are we really going to think about approaching this visually all right now let's work through this together and let's actually try to think about what four tenths looks like so if you view this entire square as a whole you see that we've divided into ten equal columns or ten equal sections and four of those tenths are shaded in so what you see here in blue is four tenths but how do we divide that into five and make sense of it well one way to think about it is to imagine four tenths not just as four tenths but to imagine it as 40 hundredths so this would be imagining it as 40 hundredths so we can rewrite four tenths divided by five as 40 hundredths divided by five and now we could think about taking these 40 hundredths each of these little squares is a hundredth and divide it into five equal sections and then we could say well how many hundredths are in each of those five equal sections so let's do that so let's see this is 1 this is 2 this is 3 this is 4 and then we have five equal sections so how many hundredths are in each of those equal sections well we can see in each of them you have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 so 40 hundredths divided by 5 is going to be 8 hundredths because we have 8 of these little squares in each of those 5 equal sections so 8 hundredths we would write like this and so 40 hundredths divided by 5 is 8 hundredths then 4 tenths divided by 5 is also equal to 8 hundredths