Today, we introduced the math concept about fractions while we also happen to be learning about fairness! Mrs. Herbert baked a rectangular shaped cake and iced it to share with the class. She started by sharing with the leader and 'cutting' one SMALL piece for Liam and the rest Mrs. Herbert got to eat. The students were pretty quick to realize that that was not fair for more than one reason (a: there are more students in the class than just Liam and b: Liam didn't get an equal piece compared to Mrs. Herbert's).
So we tried again (really we only scored the icing so we didn't make a mess of the cake!) We shared it equally and learned the name of one 'half'. When we divide something into two equal pieces, we call that one half.
We decided that was too much cake for two people so Liam chose a friend to include. So we re-iced the cake to get rid of the marks and showed what it would be with three people sharing. Well the pieces definitely got smaller and named each piece one 'third'.
We continued this until we had shared with 6 people. Noticing that the more we had to figure out how to share with, the smaller the pieces were getting. It can also be tricky to got into equal pieces on our first try!
And to be FAIR, we wanted to make sure everyone got a piece of our cake so we figured out how to cut the cake into 20 equal pieces and served it up as a special math treat today!
This was a tasty introduction into parts of a whole, called fractions. We will be learning more as we explore and investigate the concept of fractions.
No comments:
Post a Comment