The purpose of this activity is to engage students in using their number knowledge to understand and use an unfamiliar process.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A teacher showed her class an idea:
and another example:
Can you make up one of your own?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student chooses number that they know are easily broken into equal parts. They list the equal parts then express a collection of parts as a fraction.
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The student begins with a number and uses division to break it into equal parts. From the number of parts they chose a fraction with the same denominator and work out the fraction of the whole number using multiplication.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/what-s-going at 1:24pm on the 30th April 2024