Understanding Fractions As Representing Division

Hi, I'm Rebecca and in this film we're going to look at how to introduce the concept of fractions as representing division. So let's see how to do it. Always start with concrete and visual representations and I like to start with a simple unit fraction. For example, here I've asked children to show me how to represent one third in as many different ways as they can. And by doing this, they'll be able to see that one third is the same as splitting one whole one into three equal parts. So here we have one divided by three equals one third. Let's look at a different one. Here we have the fraction 3/4, and I've got three whole pizzas that need to be shared between four people and I've labelled the people to help me with the sharing. So let's have another look. I'm going to divide my pizza into quarters and then I'm going to share it between the four people. By doing this, we can really easily see that each person is going to get three parts of the pizza. So we can say that three divided by four is the same as three quarters. So, finally, you'd want to challenge your pupils to see if this rule works with all fractions. For example, are 38 the same as 3 divided by 8? And through investigation, they will see that, yes, all fractions represented as division are the numerator divided by the denominator. So there you go. That's how to introduce the concept of fractions represented as division.