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 :-)