One of the trickiest things to understand about fractions are that they are only comparable if they are defined by the same whole. For example, if I eat a half a pizza and you eat a third of a pizza, we don't know who ate more since I never said anything about the sizes of our pizzas!
To help students understand this concept, I've been using colored rods. The red rod is half of a purple rod, but it isn't "half" by its nature. The red rod is also a third of a brown rod or a fourth of a blue rod.
I can also ask student questions such as, "If the blue rod is 2/3 of the whole, which rod is the whole? Which rod is 1/3 of the whole?"
We can use them to explore and model equivalency and create our own challenges to demonstrate deeper understanding.
Pattern Block Fractions:
Today, some of the students are going to begin
working on this great challenge problem by Kathy Fosnot:
A fourth-grade class traveled on a field trip in four separate vehicles. The school provided a lunch of submarine sandwiches for each group. When they stopped for lunch, the subs were cut and shared as follows:
- The first group had 3 people
and shared 2 subs equally.
- The second group had 4 people
and shared 3 subs equally.
- The third group had 9 people
and shared 6 subs equally.
- The last group had 6 people
and shared 4 subs equally.
When they returned from the field trip, the children began to argue
that the portion of the sandwiches they received was not fair, that some
children got more to eat than others. Were they right? Or did everyone get the
same amount?
Here we are starting work on our Coast Miwok-inspired Kotcha. Keith sourced all the materials and came to school multiple times to help us construct! THANK YOU SO MUCH KEITH!!!!
The students are digging out post holes:
Starting construction of the dome:
Lashing techniques:
We're finishing up on Wednesday afternoon!
My scientists are hard at work building dioramas of a tropical rainforest ecosystem. When we learn something new about the tropical rain forests, I pull out a bunch of supplies and ask them to figure out how to add it to their dioramas. Their finished dioramas will show their learning about the layers of the rainforests and other interesting features of the forests such as strangler vines, buttress roots, epiphytes, awesome rainforest animals, and more!
