Fractions: Practical Ideas And Resources

Hi, I'm Felicity and today we're going to be looking at some practical ideas you can use when teaching fractions. Fractions can be very difficult for pupils to relate to because they seem like such an abstract idea. So what you really need to do is relate it to some real life context. Food is something that children can really readily relate to. So, for example, you could have a chocolate bar, you could physically have a chocolate bar. I've just drawn one here on the board. Now, you can divide this in two and you give them an idea of what a half really looks like. Similarly, you can use pizzas. Now, here I've got my magnetic pizza slices, so I've got one that's divided into four or quarters and another that's divided into three thirds. So if we take away one quarter and one third, it's very clear for the children to see that 3/4 is bigger than 2/3. Another way of comparing fractions using these resources is fraction strips. So here I've got a whole and then I've got three thirds and then I have two halves. Now, if you just take away the third and the half, it's very clear to see that a half is greater than one third. And finally, you can use counters to represent a proportion of a set. So here I have a set of 12 counters and I've represented a quarter using the blue counters. This has been divided into four parts, so we can see that a quarter of 12 is three counters. These are just some ideas you can use when teaching fractions.