Teaching maths to children can at times be difficult, even for us teachers! However I have devised a great way to help children understand the dreaded topic of FRACTIONS! (Pause here for dramatic effect!)
In secondary school, I spent some time teaching the basics of fractions to a very bright group of year 7’s. Great, no problem right? WRONG!
This topic confuses even the most confident of students, so I decided that what they needed was a little of Mrs Thaman’s logic. Everything in life comes back to pizza!
For our maths lesson, period 4, just before lunch, I bought in pizza for us to eat, but not before I had used the pizzas to help me explain how fractions work!
I bought six pizzas, cooked them in the food technology department (home economics to those of us old enough remember it by its former name), and asked one of the TA’s to bring them up to my classroom.
My poor students then spent an agonising 20 minutes going over what fractions were, and how they related to one another! It’s funny because when the year 7’s realised that they were not simply going to just eat the pizza, and that they had to do some maths first, it was amazing how much they understood!
The pizza lesson was rated as one of the top lessons we did in maths, not bad eh?
My top tip is, teach your children about the way we use fractions in everyday life, be it when sharing pizza out, to dividing up a pack of sweets, even diluting squash….help them to understand that fractions are important, if only to stop a sibling getting more than they do! It really will make a difference when they do this topic in school.
