Teaching fractions? If so, you've come to the right place. Check out these teaching ideas and fractions activities for your primary classroom!
If you are studying fractions with your first grade students, you can reinforce fourths by using squares cut into quarters to resemble kites. You can have the students color in one fourth of the first kite, 2 fourths of the second kite, 3 fourths of the third kite, and 4 fourths of the last kite.
They can write the fractions under each kite. If they are nicely colored you may want to display them on a Spring or Math themed bulletin board with the title in your classroom!
If you are looking for more Spring themed ideas you could have your students make Fraction Flowers. Give each student a paper plate and have them divide it into equal pieces. They can then paint or color in a fraction of the flower. Add a stem and some leaves and you've got a fraction flower! Students can write the fraction in words or numbers along the stem.
Fractions Pipe Cleaner Activity
If you want to show the relationship between a whole, halves, thirds and fourths, try cutting a pipe cleaner into fractions. The teacher may want to do the cutting because pipe cleaners can be quite sharp! I know because I hurt my finger when I tried it. If you don't want to use pipe cleaners, you could use rectangular strips of colored paper, cardboard, string, or ribbon.
Fractions Secret Code Puzzles
For more fun with fractions, your students may enjoy these free Fraction Secret Code Puzzles! Each fraction represents a letter. Students have to match the fraction number to the picture of the fraction to find out the letter.
Fair Share Problems
If you are teaching grade 2 or 3 you may be getting into problem solving using fractions. Fair share problems require students to find out how to split/share objects evenly.
Pizza is a great thing to use to visualize breaking a whole into parts. For example, if 2 people want to share a 4 piece pizza equally, what fraction of the pizza will each person get?
Have students draw a circle and cut it into 4 equal pieces. Then they can give one slice to each person until there are no slices left. After that they can shade in the pieces each person has and easily see that each person would get two fourths (2/4), which is also the same as one half (1/2) of the whole pizza.
This worksheet is from my Fractions Worksheets & Activities resource.
You might also be interested in checking out this blog post about some fun Graphing activities!