Welcome back from Thanksgiving break! I was a long and short weekend all at the same time. I really noticed today that some of my students were a little rusty with adding and subtracting fractions; but multiplying fractions didn't seem to cause anyone any trouble
Today we started looking at dividing fractions. We use a lot of food when we talk about fractions. I think it's because we are so used to dividing and sharing food.
We looked at an example involving dividing blocks of cheese to make pizzas. If you have 9 blocks of cheese and it takes 1/3 of a block to make a pizza, then how many pizzas can you make?
Using diagrams of cheese blocks, we figured out you could make 27 pizzas. We did the same thing with some different fractions of a block for each pizza. And then I had some students start offering a pattern they thought they saw: it turns out it's the same pattern involved in the "algorithm" of dividing fractions. But the kids had a different way of describing it. I have made a short video to show you the kind of thing we worked on today:
Remember that I try really hard to have homework posted on my calendar online and that all of these messages are archived. You can reach the calendar and the email archive at http://www.mrmacnevin.com.
Thank you!
Brian MacNevin
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