Fractions of sets

This term I am focusing on Fractions, Decimals and Percentages with my students. The students are started to see the connection and relationship between these three areas i.e. that 0.2 is the same as 20% which is the same as 1/5. They are also learning how to simplify fractions and about equivalency at the same time.

So on Monday we started using paper strips to work out the fraction of a certain number of chocolate bars each person would get.

Example:
Miss Breen has 4 Chocolate bars left over at the end of the school term. She wants to share them out with the 5 children that were the best helpers that week. How much chocolate will each child get?

The paper strips helped the students to think about the chocolate bars as wholes before they broke them up into fractions and shared them out. We had a few tries, much trial and error before they began to realise that it was a good idea to start by breaking each whole paper strip into the number of people from each problem.

Once the students understood that each problem related to parts of a whole we moved onto the fractional equations. The students were still free to draw pictures but they began to use multiplication and division as a way to work out their answers.

Here are some photos from this week, of the students from all my groups working on these types of problems.

p.s. I let my kids draw on the tables with Whiteboard markers, it makes for a great working space :-)

Understanding Fractions - Group 7

Today I asked Group 7 (Yr 5/6) to show me fractions in more than one way (multiple representations). This group of students are lacking understanding of the key idea that fractions is about parts of a whole. They are learning that the whole could be five, the whole could be 100, the whole could be a set of objects (discrete), just repeated numbers added together, or even a shape (continuous) but they can all show the same fractional number related to the whole.

In the photos below I asked the students to show me four quarters, this is only the beginning of these lessons so as they progress we will use other materials as well so that they get experience of fractions in many forms.

• The multi-link cubes stuck together are fractions of a shape 
• the groups are fractions in sets 
• The numbers represent equal sharing creating a whole using numbers