Fraction Frenzy!!

Fractions, Fractions and More Fractions. . . 

This unit we went a little crazy with fractions. I was inspired by many ideas from my fellow teachers through Pinterest and blog posts so I decided to go all out and practice as many different ways as possible. This is what my bulletin board came out like, I love it!!

 

We worked with fractions of a whole and fractions of a set. After completing some in class work and posts in our math journals (which BTW are fabulous as this is the first year I have used them), I had the students each complete three activities.  

Our first activity was ice cream fractions. The students created their own ice cream cones and wrote the fractional parts of each. We were also able to pull in graphing skills by collecting data of the entire class and creating bar graphs. Thanks to Susan we were able to take this lesson even deeper. Each student developed two questions about the data and wrote it on a large index card. The cards were then switched around and the questions were answered by another student. When the student was done answering the questions they gave it back to the original owner who then checked their work. So many math skills in just one lesson. To get this lesson click HERE to visit my TPT website.

 I love to see the creativity of the kids. It was their idea to make the bar graphs look like the

 ice cream flavors!!

The next activity we completed worked with parts of a whole. The students were to create pizzas with different toppings and show the fractional parts of each. We brainstormed toppings that could be eaten on pizza and students drew pizzas for pizzas divided into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths. They then chose their favorite to create a large pizza. Here are some examples below.

The last activity we did was create a bubble gum machine. Students made a bubble gum machine, colored bubble gum pieces and the recorded the fraction pieces that they had.  I don't have any individual pictures of these, but you can see some in the bulletin board picture at the top of this post.

It really was a lot of fun and I could see the students' knowledge of fractions getting deeper with each activity we created.