Welcome to term 3. Each class are investigating fractions. Quite a few students have already learned to accurately fold a strip of paper into thirds and sevenths.

As adults, we use fractions every day - dividing a pizza, telling the time and cutting a birthday cake but most of us have all but forgotten how we came to learn and understand them. 

How children are taught fractions

Children understand fractions better when they are used in a real life context such as length, time, money and weight - the way we use them every day as adults. However, children learn fractions better by using models, which give a visual representation.

Area models

'Area models' use coloured shapes to teach fractions. With these, it's easy to see how much of the whole each fraction takes up. A typical exercise might be for children to work out what fraction in each shape is coloured. 

A common misunderstanding for children is that the smaller the denominator, the smaller the fraction. For example, children might think that 1/5 is bigger than 1/3 simply because 5 is a larger number than 3. 

On the other hand, most children understand that they will get a bigger slice of pizza if it is shared between three people rather than five.

Collections

Using collections of objects is another way of teaching fractions. In a sets based activity, children might be asked to draw a ring around 1/2 of the items in the sets below. 

A child who is struggling with understanding fractions might attempt to answer this by cutting each individual shape in half, like this:

It's not wrong exactly, but it indicates that they haven't fully grasped the idea of a fraction as a number in its own right. Lots of exercises using sets can help with understanding this!

Number lines

Number lines help students move on to seeing fractions as numbers that are between whole numbers, and to be able to understand them as a way of talking about time and distance. A typical exercise might be:

So your child has to count how many times each number line has been split up and decide how far along the line the fraction goes.