This week we focused on decimals and fractions. I was one of the three students to present and I focused my lesson solely on the relationship between decimals and fractions. To prep for my presentation and develop a better understanding of this topic I found this Youtube video extremely helpful. Fast forward to 3:40 to the decimal portion of the video.
It is important to teach students the meaning of each number value before AND after the decimal as this video outlines the base-ten number system. For example, 14.738 represents (1 tens, 4 ones, 7 tenths, 3 hundredths and 8 thousandths). I highly recommend looking at the example she demonstrates at 4:30 minutes in the video to use in your classroom as an introduction to this topic. It provides a clear understanding that I believe will help students get comfortable right off the bat!
Roland O'Daniel. (February 25, 2010). Exit slips. (Online Image). Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2cVWoyi
Above you see an image of three different ways a student demonstrates what 0.9 can represent. Students LOVE visuals, and what better way to teach students fractions then with PIZZA. Yes you read that correctly, it wasn't your hunger taking over your mind. Pizza is a great representation that you can use to explain fractions to your students, but be careful with this because if the pizza isn't perfectly circular each piece cannot be equal to one another.
I found this fraction pizza game online called Tony Fraction's Pizza Shop. It creates orders at the top screen, allowing the students to create the pizza on their own and pressing "send" when they completed the order. If the student creates the pizza correctly they get the cost of the pizza in their earnings, however if the student gets the order wrong, a message appears on the screen stating "Incorrect. Your costumer is not happy. $2.00 off" that comes out of their earnings. I think its a fun way for students to learn, and can motivate students to see how much they can earn (even though it's not real money...sigh).
Regarding our time in class, after presenting I reflected what went well and what did not. This is great to do to know what to change and keep the next time I choose to use this activity again. I definitely enjoyed creating a lesson because it allowed me to refresh on this topic as well as participate in the other lessons to get more ideas on how to present this information. I want to introduce one last activity that I enjoyed from this week, this is the Tarsia puzzle that teachers can make online. This concept allows teachers to use different math questions and have students try to solve the problems correctly to create a shape. Below, as you can see we were close but not close enough. We did not end up completing it but it was definitely motivating and I can definitely see myself creating a puzzle for my lessons in the future!
Until next time, Happy Thanksgiving!!
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