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 :-)

The Egg Couch

Last week I had the chance to interact with other Math Support Teachers from around New Zealand at our Seminar Days. I was shown this fabulous idea of using the below image as a basis for a Mathematical investigation:

Source: Eggs Sofa by Fulvio Bonavia http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/axn_sonys_satellite_tv_channel_eggs_sofa

Yesterday I used this image for the first time with a class of Year 7 students. Each group were given the image and asked to list down all the things they noticed about the picture i.e.I notice the eggs are in trays, there are lines going down etc. 

Once they had written down the things they noticed, they were then asked to write down any questions under 'I wonder' i.e. I wonder who made this couch? how is it stuck together? etc.

Then we had a quick discussion on the types of questions they had come up with. Are they mathematical, scientific, general?

From here they were asked to make predictions of how many eggs they thought there may be altogether. We discussed what a prediction was and an example of a good prediction versus a silly prediction.

The groups made their predictions and then started thinking about how they would go about completing this investigation i.e. what strategies could we use?

We ran out of time so unfortunately we didn't get any further however, this is great because investigations take time and this helps the students learn perseverance when attempting to solve challenging mathematical problems.

I will be using this same image with my groups, so check back in the next couple of weeks to see how they undertook the challenge : - )

Here are some photo's of room 7 working on the problem:

Here are a couple of photo's of some of my year 7 and 8 students working on their piece of the egg couch: