An Introduction To Mixed Numbers

Hi, I'm Felicity, and today we're going to be looking at how we can build a conceptual understanding of mixed numbers. Children in year five and six are expected to do calculations using mixed numbers. But before we do this, it's really important to build an understanding of what a mixed number actually is. So a mixed number consists of a whole number and a fraction, for example, 2¼. Now, we can represent this using concrete resources such as pizzas. As I've shown here, I've got two whole pizzas representing that whole number, and then I have a quarter representing that fraction there, which is our mixed number. At this point, you might want to discuss some real life context examples for children. So, for example, you could say, the journey is one and a half hours long. That elephant must weigh three and three quarter tons. Can I please have two and a half slices of toast? It's really important, though, that you don't get stuck in the trap of using round examples every time like pizzas. So when you move on to representing your work pictorially, you might want to use an example like egg boxes. So here I've got three boxes of eggs. Now, two of them are full with six eggs in each, and then the last one only has one egg. So we could write this as a mixed number, two being the whole, then 1/6 being the fraction, because there's only one egg in that final box. And finally, we could use a number line to show mixed numbers. Here I've just got a simple number line from one to three. If I want to show two and a half, I'd need to make a mark on the line exactly halfway between 2 and 3, which can be represented like this. And then I'd encourage the children to label it as a mixed number. And these are just some ways that you can build a conceptual understanding of mixed numbers.