How To Teach Fractions
Learning fractions can be useful in our daily life activities. There are many ways to learn fractions, one example is by cutting up a pizza and dividing them into parts.
Hi, I'm Donald Sinclair. I'm a science and maths teacher with Greater London Tutors. Today, we're going to be looking at how to teach various topics.
A good visual way to teach fractions, say to give you an idea of a pizza or a pie or something else being sliced up into a number of equal slices. So for example, if we want to visualize the fraction 3/8, a good way to describe it is to imagine a pizza cut up to 8 equal slices and then 3 slices being all there is there. This can also be used to teach ideas of things like top heavy fractions like 11/6.
Here, you can imagine a pizza cut up into 6 slices and another one into 11 slices. It should become clear that we're going to need more than one pizza. Six score for this pizza and the five are left, go into this one here.
This shows that the 11/6 can also be written as 1 whole pizza and 5/6. The useful way of converting for heavy fractions is called compound fractions. The idea of fractions being represented by slices of pizza, that can also be very handy when trying to add fractions together or when you are trying to teach how to add fractions together.
Here's by the half or 3/4s, doing the sum by itself seems quite tricky. However, if you visualize it as two pizzas, you could almost see the answer immediately. First of all, bring in the idea that the slices of pizza have to be the same size, so here if we have a half pizza, then you can turn that into 2 quarters.
So that's a very good way of showing that the half is the same thing as two quarters. Then you can ask how many will you have if you add it together? Well, one of the slices can go in there, so you get one whole pizza and there'll be 1/4 left over. That shows very clearly that the answer there is one and one-quarter.
But teaching how to multiply fractions, simply multiply the top numbers together and the bottom numbers together actually makes it much easier than adding fractions. Here 5x3 is 15 and 7x8 is 56. And these are some basic ideas how to teach the idea of fractions. .