Fractions in elementary school

I faced some difficulties in teaching fractions to weak students in elementary school. When i used concrete object (example a pie/cakes), they are quite understand what I am teaching. But when it comes to problem solving questions, they are lost. One of my friends said that the students cant relate fractions in their daily lives. That's why they really cant grasp the knowledge. Is the any activities that can be done to enable students to relate to daily lives in order to build strong foundation in fraction.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on September 4, 2009 at 9:29pm

What grade are you teaching? I have a fun game I always do with my class. You need 6 Hershey bars. I make a table with three columns on the board. One column has 3 bars of Hershey's stuck to it, the next two, and the last, one. We go around the class, one by one, and ask the kids to put their name on the board under a column of their choice. It starts off easy, but gets harder by the time you get to the 6th or seventh name. If you count the number of squares you can ask questions like, 'how many pieces will you get now?' and 'what is 1/8 of 16' etc. This is about the hardest I ever see my class work on fractions because they are determined to work out how to get the most chocolate possible!

There are also sports references like 4 quarters in a basketball game, halves in soccer, etc.

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Permalink Reply by Jessica Eitzen on December 25, 2009 at 2:45pm

I know this is a little off-topic, but we recently had a 5th grader become a whiz at fractions over the summer. We eventually found out why...mom's new boyfriend was a drug dealer.