Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Relationship between fractions and division.

Today's lesson on Mathematics became a sharing session. All students were 'transformed' into pupils with good values and lots of chocolate bar(fake of course) and began sharing parts of it with one another.

The lesson began by teaching pupils how to divide the chocolate into an accurate number of parts.
I wonder if students saw and understood the pattern behind this 'sharing'.

The trick is to first know how many person one is sharing the chocolate first.
From there on, the chocolate is divided into the number of persons in the group.
Following on, each person will receive a small piece and the fraction of the number of pieces can be "seen" very easily.

After which, pupils are grouped and given strips of paper to divide accordingly. I am glad that most groups made the effort to try and divide. (For those who didn't, you know who you are).
Eventually, most of the groups got the answer.

An example can be seen from this pupil's journal.
Hence, the fraction each person will receive is 3/4. (three-quarters).

For class 5-5 pupils.
Can you all see the pattern? What happens if the number of chocolate bars is more than the amount of persons sharing?
(E.g. If I were to share 5 chocolate bars with 4 persons, what fraction of the chocolate bar would each receive?)

Would one derive at a mixed number?
What do you think?

Mr.Xie.

No comments:

Post a Comment