Sunday, March 27, 2011
week 10 post
When I first saw the articles that we were to be reading this week, I was intrigued by the article titled " 10 Practical Tips for Making Fractions Come Alive and Make Sense." This is something that I, as well as my students, could definitely benefit from. I thought that the first point was very useful. Focusing a lot of time on the actual idea of fractions is something that I believe will help children. They need to have in depth understanding of what a fraction is and how it relates to a whole in order to be able to relate it to manipulatives and word problems. Another tip that I found to be very useful was #3 which stated the importance of fractions as being numbers. Children understand numbers and therefore if they understand fractions as such, not as a foreign idea, they feel that they are more tangible. The author suggests that you should do this by using number lines and other such tools. I wish, and believe that my colleagues will feel the same way, that we had more articles like this because it was so useful. The article actually gave things that we could do now and later in our classrooms. Thanks for the information Nic!
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Jenna, I feel that you made a great connection to how this article could really help us out in the future when we have classrooms of our own. The 10 tips article was interesting to look at when I tried to compare it to my first grade classroom. When it does come to tip #3, I feel that my students still don't see fractions as that. I noticed during my placement over the past few weeks that fractions we're introduced in very obscure ways. My CT uses fraction pieces of a pizza and has used it when we look at time, but I do not believe they see this as being a number. After being able to talk about how we might be able to make a lesson and describe what exactly we wanted out of it like the activity in class, was a great way to focus on what we want students to take out of fractions. Being able to get down to the basics of them to first graders is hard. I feel that they need to make outside connections, like with a pizza or pie or etc., to really help them understand fractions.
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