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Welcome to Workshop Wednesday! Today, we are sharing the ways we use food or candy in math. I LOVE edible math, don’t you? Well, ok, let’s face it… I love edible anything. 😛
We are currently learning about multiples of fractions… This is always a difficult thing to teach- not because they don’t know how to multiply, but because of the way the problems are worded. There are two types of word problems they see, and they have to be able to MODEL both. The first way is easy- If 8 people will each eat 1/4 of a pizza, how many pizzas do we need to order? This is easy for them to show in a model- 8 fourths… but then there are the parts of a whole problems that just blow their mind. For example: If I have 6 cookies, and 1/3 of them are chocolate chip, how many are chocolate chip? According to the standard, they can’t just multiply 6 x 1/3 to get 2. They have to understand what they are doing- the MODEL… and luckily, one of my fabulous partner teachers came up with a fun Skittles Fractions work page!! (Can you tell we all love food on my grade level??) I bought the fun size packs of Skittles, and each kiddo got two packs.
Then, we began figuring out what fractional parts of wholes would be with our Skittles!
We use what I call the “box method.” I don’t know if that’s really what it should be called, but my kids can do it, so that’s all I care about. 😛 This activity had the boxes drawn in for them at first to help scaffold. They knew the WHOLE rectangle was 20, and the denominator in the fraction is 4, so that tells us how many boxes we need to cut the “whole” into… then the numerator tells us how many of those boxes to count to find our answer.
By the end of the activity, they had to draw the rectangle, and then decide how many boxes to cut it into, as well as how many should go in each box. They really did an awesome job! And they were super excited that they got to eat their Skittles when we finished. :o)
Since I didn’t create the page, it wouldn’t be right for me to share it- BUT it would be super easy for you to create if you want to do this activity too! Use that “shapes” tool in Microsoft to draw your rectangles! :o)
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