A short YouTube instructional video (presenter: Felicity) demonstrating how to identify and explore equivalent fractions using visual shapes and models. Examples include 1/2 = 2/4 and 1/5 = 2/10 shown via pizza slices, fraction walls/strips, bar models, and folded paper; the video encourages hands-on exploration for children.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Felicity, and today we're going to be looking at equivalent fractions. Equivalent fractions are fractions that look different, but they still refer to the same amount of the whole. These can be explored really well with shapes. For example, we've got our pizza slices here. Again, I have two quarters and one half. And we can see that although these are different fractions, they're equivalent to one another. But because they refer to the same amount of the whole, we can look at this with fraction walls and strips, like we have here. So I have the one here just to show us the whole, and then I have one half and I have two quarters. Now we can see quite visually that we've got the same amount, so one half is equal to two quarters. Again, we can encourage children to explore equivalent fractions themselves. Using strips of paper, they can fold these into different fractions and see which ones are equivalent or the size as one another. Let's have a look at a bar model to help us visualize this. So here I have a bar. I've divided it into two equal parts or halves. If I were to divide each half in half again, I would create quarters. In doing so, you can see that I've got two quarters here and that two quarters is the same as one half. I haven't had to do any more shading. So. So we can see that one half is equivalent to two quarters. Once the children are confident with basic examples like this, we can move on to comparing two bar models to encourage them to find new equivalent fractions. So here I've got one bar model divided into five equal parts or fifths. And then I have another one which is divided into 10 equal parts or tenths. So we can see that a tenth is. Is smaller than a fifth. So if I have one fifth, it would be a good idea to ask the children how many sections of this bar divided into tenths would I need to shade in to represent the same amount as that one fifth that's been shaded in up here, it's really, really clear to see that if I were to shade in 2/10, that refers to the same amount of the whole as one fifth. So we can say one fifth is equivalent to 2/10. These are just some ways we can explore equivalent fractions using shapes.
