Please can I pick your brains about a lesson on fractions

(12 Posts)
manyhands Fri 05-Jul-13 07:54:03

I really really want to get a job in a lovely school close to my home. I will be teaching fractions to a year 1 class who already know halves and quarters and are begining to understand fractions of amounts. This school does not do continuous provision. So I will start with a fraction storybook, wholey-cow. Then I will teach the terms numerator and demoniator and explain how to find a fraction of an amount you divide by the deominator multiply by the numerator (in simple terms). I will demonstrate this using a simple equivilient fractions wall with blocks showing 1/2 and 2/2, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 etc. The blocks will have double sided sticky tape on, I will count out the starting amount using dried kidney beans, physically share in across the blocks on the equivilent fraction so they can clearly see the 1/2 of 4 is 2 etc. They will then go to there differentiated fraction wall, using the share technique with kidney beans and double sided tape on laminated equivilent fraction walls, work out 1/2 and 1/4 of amounts. Higher achievers will work out 2/4 and 3/4s too. Plenary- checking answers, thumbs up thumbs down self assessment and a whole class extension question, half a measurement.
This is a job I so really want for many good professional and family reasons.
Thank you very much for any busy people who give me feedback

lljkk Fri 05-Jul-13 08:22:06

Teaching 5-6yos numerator & denominator?! shock
Retreating with my state-ed numpty children back to the provinces.

DS was just starting to learn that kind of stuff at end of y2, and a lot of them found it very hard to understand.

manyhands Fri 05-Jul-13 08:46:48

Fair point, state ed myself but they do tend to teach the maths terms earlier now. I was thinking of pizza pictures with 1/2, 1/3 etc marked on which they put the kidney beans.

CecilyP Fri 05-Jul-13 08:56:25

Multiplying fractions with Y1? Seems a bit demanding to me. Do they even know their tables yet?

doublecakeplease Fri 05-Jul-13 09:00:49

I would be very practical. 2 Big building blocks stuck together. 2 children come to the front and take them apart - 'how many do you have each?' write on the board in fraction form but don't refer to it yet. How many altogether? Write on the board but don't mention.

Repeat loads with different children / fractions. All coming to the front, thanked then returned to seats. Once you've done a few ask if they notice anything. Hopefully they'll say the bottom number always shows ... Maybe have numerator / denominator cards they can come and stick next to the fractions they've generated / written. If you notice anyone flying ahead or misbehaving ask them to come and be scribe. Good luck!

beachyhead Fri 05-Jul-13 09:03:46

We are doing fractions in Y3 now, but the more complicated ones.

So in Y1 and Y2 we did pizza cut into pieces, sandwiches cut into pieces etc. Now she is looking at pictures of seven paper clips and three of them are circled. She then has to write out the fraction of circled to non circled, so 3/7 circled and 4/7 non circled. They can then see that the two added together makes a whole.

But Y1 and Y2 I would stick to pizza....

manyhands Fri 05-Jul-13 09:16:41

Excellent ideas, am sticking to Pizzas, I've found some lovely ready made ones with 1/4 labelled in one and 1/2 labelled in the other. I am going to demonstrate 1/2 of ten which is ten divided (or shared, not sure of yr1 terminology) between two. I'm thinking of making a giant pizza, sitting the children around it in a circle, four children will be tomatoes who will stand two in one half of the pizza, two in the other half. The children will then count out kidney beans say 10 which they will share between the two halves of their pizza. Would you use the term numerator and demoninators lljkk's comment has made me wonder if I'm way off the mark there.

aoifebush Fri 05-Jul-13 09:22:50

When I taught year 1 I had my kids make groups. To find 1/2 of eg10 they counted out 10 objects, make 2 equal groups then say how many was in each group. They used lots of practical apparatus and it reinforces their counting skills as well as ensuring they understand that fractions involve parts of a whole. At year 1 it's more important to understand what the concept is than the terms. With this exercise you can differentiate easily depending on the class for any fractions eg 2/3 of 21 for more able children- count 21 objects, make 3 groups, how many in 2 of the groups?
Strong simple modelling is vital with little ones... and maybe some word problems for the plenary using the children eg get 4 kids to stand up. I have 16 pencils, how many will x have? X,y and z have? How do we write that as a fraction? That will show if they actually understand what a fraction is...
Best of luck!

pointythings Fri 05-Jul-13 09:23:38

I wouldn't use the technical terms - I'd write down the fraction using pizza as an example and then explain which part of it does what. So a pizza cut into 8 and you have 3 pieces = 3/8. The 3 tells you how many pieces you have, the 8 tells you how many pieces the pizza was cut into originally (and so how many pieces are left for other people to have).

Tiggles Fri 05-Jul-13 09:24:53

I think they do learn terms a lot earlier now than we ever did.
DS2 (year 1) often comes home talking about split digraphs, alliteration from literacy, venn diagrams in maths etc. It doesn't seem to phase him knowing the 'real' names for things.

manyhands Fri 05-Jul-13 09:26:37

Thank you so much, this has been so helpful.

PastSellByDate Fri 05-Jul-13 10:53:45

Not a teacher - and as my name suggests I am genuinely older than the hills, but...

back in the day...

Miss M (my lovely Year 2 teacher) started a lesson introducing fractions by saying how hungry she was. She could eat a whole cake. Oh but that's rude - maybe I should share.

I know I'll give a piece to X. She cuts cake in half with flourish and spreads into two pieces. Now I have a big piece and X has a big piece - there are two pieces to the whole cake and if we wanted to use a secret maths code to show how one of these pieces fits into the whole cake we'd say one piece was 1/2 of the cake - because in total we have how many pieces here??? [Queue Dramatic look around the room - children waving arms wildly - and someone pleased to be selected to say TWO!] So one piece is one out of a possible 2 pieces which we write (in secret maths code - only to be used by the cleverest children in XXXX) as 1 / 2. This tells those in the know there are 2 pieces in total and one piece is one out of 2 possible pieces.

Now I feel there are still a lot of hungry people here. What if I sliced each piece of cake in half again? How many pieces would I have?

[Queue mad waving of hands - answer = 4].

OK so we now have four pieces. So does anyone know the secret maths code for one of the four pieces.

[may be some thinking and puzzling going on - but someone will guess 1/4 or say 1 out of 4].

Great so now we know 1 piece of the cake with 4 possible pieces is written in super intelligent children maths code as 1/4 - what do we think we write for 2 out of 4 pieces????

2/4 (yep 2 /4). Now that's interesting. If we look at the whole cake again can we see that two 1/4 pieces makes 1/2 of the cake? Hmmm. That's neat isn't it.

What happens if I want to use secret super bright maths sparks code for 3 pieces of this cake which I've cut into 4 pieces. What would that be?????

You get the idea.

She cut the cake up into 16 pieces in the end - we worked our way through various secret code fractions & in the end we each had 1/2 of a piece (1 / 32) as a treat!

You could do this with flat round breads, a watermelon, etc...


She then had a bunch of prepared colour circles: 1 whole circle/ 2 x 1/2 circles/ 4 x 1/4 circles/ 8 x 1/8 circles & 16 x 16 circles - and each was a different colour.

We were divided into groups and asked to make notes about how many coloured pieces made up the whole imaginary cake and then use secret code to describe the pieces.

over cake (we all got a bit) - we then were asked to think about could we add up all the pieces again to make a whole cake?

Miss M had an odd sense of humour - so this was done if we each sicked up the piece of cake could we make a whole cake again - but at 7 we found it hilarious.

4 pieces - sick up 1 (1/4 of cake), then another (2/4 or 1/2 of cake), then another (3/4 of cake) and then the last (four quarters of cake or 1 cake).

reinforced by writing a lot of fractions on the board - and to be honest I've never had a fraction issue since.

hasten to add (numerator & denominator was never used at all).

not sure if it helps - but if I can remember this all these years on - it must have had some good aspects of teaching there...

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