So, I’ve been unhappy with my adding fractions lessons for a while. They were always ‘good enough’ but not actually good. This year, I decided that good enough wasn’t good enough. I needed to finally attack them. Flesh them out, make them interesting, build in opportunity for students to really test their skills.
As I’ve gone through a lot of my older slides, I’ve removed a lot of ‘narration’. That’s true of these slides, too. Out with the clicking through written talk and animated examples, in with example problem pairs.
I thought about what I really wanted students to do. I wanted them to calculate properly, not take shortcuts. Hence :
I wanted them to get a sense of what fractions where. Not just mindless calculate, but think and interrogate their answers. Hence:
I added a little thinky thing about diagrams.
I would have added more, but I think that’s best done with something likes mathsbot.com and not with PowerPoint.
I wanted more puzzly and interesting ways to get students practicing those core skills.
I hope now you’re starting to get a sense of how big this one is!
I also wanted some good old fashioned SLOP.
I actually had these questions in the slide before. But I have tidied them up significantly. They look a lot nicer now!
What about a question where we simply have to identify WHEN we should add fractions.
I just thought of this format this week and I’m already in love with it.
I wanted to add a little mini-investigation, also.
I HAVEN’T EVEN GOT TO MIXED NUMBERS YET.
Let’s do some practice with them.
How about some practice but in a different format to change things up a bit?
What about continued fractions? Those are interesting. Maybe have a chat about those.
We could even play a game!
I don’t think I’ve put together a more comprehensive lesson.
There maybe too much here, but you can always skip the bits you don’t wanna do. I don’t think you could say there’s too little.
Probably won’t have another lesson for a while. It’s half term and then I don’t quite know what to make a start on next (rounding?)