4 Great Activities for Tackling Fractions & Decimals!
Fractions and decimals can be tough concepts for students to grasp. As Stephanie of Teaching in Roomn 6 found out, exposure, repetition, and practice is key! With this in mind, she created a wonderful learning aid/reference tool and several games to help her students master these important concepts!
Foldable Learning Aid
While her students knew the basics and had been taught the algorithms, Stephanie wanted her kiddos to be able to be able to recognize and convert common fractions on sight. She came up with this foldable learning aid that shows the most common fractions and their equivalent fractions, equivalent decimals, percentages, and fractional pictures.
Added to their math notebooks, students can refer to the foldable as needed and, hopefully, start to recall/apply the information without help!
Practice with Games
When a concept is challenging, it's even more important to move beyond traditional worksheets and book work, and find creative ways to engage your students. Stephanie loves incorporating games into her math lessons and found that, while simple, these games offered a great opportunity for her students to have fun while practicing with fractions and decimals!
Go Fish! Students work to make matches by finding equivalent fractions, decimals, and percents! Each student has a piece of scratch paper and pencil (or white board and dry erase marker, laminated page and vis-a-vis marker, etc.) that they use to convert the fraction, decimal, or percent on their cards into their equivalent forms. [Whether they know the equivalent form or not, doing it 'long hand' is a great way to practice with the algorithms!] Once students know what to ask for, the game is played just like traditional Go Fish!
BINGO. To play, students fill their game board with the most common fractions and their decimal equivalents. Then, when the announcer calls out a fraction, students are invited to cover the equivalent decimal and vice versa until someone has BINGO! For example, if the fraction 1/2 is called, students would cover the decimal 0.50. And, if the decimal 0.75 is called, students would cover the fraction 3/4.
Memory. Played like traditional Memory, cards are placed face down on the table and students work to create matches of equivalent fractions and decimals. The big kicker in this game is that it contains mixed numbers, which can make the conversions a bit more tricky!
The best part about these games is that you can find them all at Stephanie's Teachers Pay Teachers store!
Helping students truly grasp the concepts of fractions and decimals can be a challenge, but hopefully these tools and games will make things go a bit more smoothly!