Math: Fractions Unit (Day 1)

by Liesl - Homeschool Den

About ten days ago we started a new fractions unit in math. I did these activities and games with both LD (age 8) and DD (age 6). We did these activities at the beginning of our math time and then the kids went on to do their daily work in their math workbooks. The kids’ math workbooks both have a chapter on fractions, but I wanted to go a bit beyond what was presented in their books. I went to our Right Start math curriculum and pulled out the book, Math Card Games. It had some fabulous ideas! (I’m sharing just a few out of 50 fraction games, many of which will be more appropriate when my kids are older.) Here are some of the activities we’ve done so far.

We took a fraction chart that looks similar to this one here and made two copies. One is our control fraction chart and we cut the other one up. I explained as they cut that the word fraction means to break up or divide into pieces which is exactly what they were doing. I had the kids build fraction stairs and we looked closely at the relationship of the numbers. The smaller the denominator (such as 1/2) the larger the strip of paper. The kids could see that paper strip 1/10 was much smaller than 1/3.

We took those same strips and some yellow fraction cards with the numbers (1, 1/2, 1/3 etc. through 1/10). The cards were all turned faced down. Then we took turns turning over the yellow number card and trying to figure out which size strip matched. That activity really helped the kids remember that the larger the denominator (like 1/10) the smaller the paper strip.