I am thrilled to guest post over at Teach Mama today for her Rockstar Sunday series! Today I talk a little more about making connections between fractions and food. I hope you’ll check out how I used graham crackers to show representations of crackers, and to help students understand the fraction number line. Click on either of the pics below!
Make those boxes make sense to students with a real world example.
Show how you can count on a number line using fractions.
Children are surrounded by words and language all day long. It is everywhere around them, on signs, all over their technology, in their books, and it takes up a large portion of the minutes in an elementary classroom. In an effort to get more math minutes in, I’ve been trying to sneak math in during other times of the day. Here is an example:
When my daughter was ill last week, I needed to take an unexpected day off. My class this year can be a little shaky with a substitute teacher. Like most classes, upsetting their routine can cause a lot of anxiety and disruption. Whenever I return the next day, I like them to reflect on their behavior the next day. I put up the chart on the easel below, and had them vote as they arrived in the morning.
We turned it into a 5 minute lesson during morning meeting on how to calculate percentages. It was perfect for my gifted students who are working on some presidential birthday data, they can now extend this thinking to their project.
This directly connects math to the real world, and it gives us data to reflect on. It is also a really visual way to look at the day! We certainly want the orange part of our graph to be at 100% next time! We talked about where we went wrong, and set goals as a class for the next time a guest teacher is in:
Putting this type of work into all parts of the day can really help students understand the importance of math in our every day life!
Beyond Traditional Math 