video
download
link to standards
©1998 University Child Development School and Bonnie Campbell Hill. No part of the Continuum may be reproduced or used without written permission of University Child Development School. Continuum adapted by University Child Development School with permission from Bonnie Campbell Hill.
|Download Math Vitamin :
PDF Notebook
Story:Students work on a vitamin story that involves helping to feed some birds. They are using pattern blocks to explore the different ways to divide up the food. In this story, each yellow hexagon equals one “whole”. In the video, you see students working at different levels of understanding yet each student is building, drawing and discussing their thinking as well as learning to write an expression/equation that matches their work. The first boy in the video is starting to understand how to identify pieces of a whole; naming each 1/6 section he has built, yet he is still bridging his understanding of those pieces as they relate to one whole. The girl in the video is working on the same story, but her challenge involves adding fractional pieces together, learning about having remainders and getting some coaching on her notation skills.
Suggested manipulatives: For this particular story, using pattern blocks (usually a more complex level of abstraction manipulative) works well. Identifying the yellow hexagon as the “whole” allows for lots of discovery amongst the students.
Prep time: Adapting the vitamin wording to fit your specific story, putting manipulatives out in the room, creating the data sheets and copying the vitamin documentation forms will take about 15-20 minutes. Set up is always more fun and shorter on time if you do this activity with a colleague.
Classroom time: Asking children to “do their best work” for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another task available (writing, free exploration etc.) for those students who finish work prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.
How to individualize/stretch: For beginning tasks, use the hexagon as a “whole” thus the green triangles will be the units of measure for all the pieces. As students progress in their understanding, change the value of the whole (perhaps two hexagons together or a red trapezoid paired with a blue parallelogram. Be creative) and have students figure out the value of each of the other pieces in relation. Another extension that was seen in the video is having students begin to combine several fractions together.
|Download Math Vitamin :
PDF
Notebook
Story: In this vitamin students use their love of folding paper to begin building an understanding of fractional values. They are introduced to fractions through basic counting skills; counting the total number of pieces in a shape and then learning to identify a single piece as part of the total number. The first child shown in the video is exploring how to see one piece of paper, with two sections and call one of the sections “one of two”. Developmentally, this is a complex task thus counting and teacher coaching are a solid introduction. The next students are drawing and folding circles into eighths and sixteenths and learning how to identify and notate the fractional pieces.
Suggested manipulatives: Starting to explore fractions with young students is fun with paper folding. Note, that this is a complex topic for concrete thinkers, so with young children, the focus is on sharing information and stretching their thinking instead of creating a product or learning an algorithm. Young students also love to explore fraction tiles for this and related activities.
Prep time: Adapting the vitamin wording to fit your specific story, putting manipulatives out in the room, creating the data sheets and copying the vitamin documentation forms will take about 15-20 minutes. Set up is always more fun and shorter on time if you do this activity with a colleague.
Classroom time: Asking children to “do their best work” for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another task available (writing, free exploration etc.) for those students who finish work prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.
How to individualize/stretch: Initially you are helping students learn a new way to “see” pieces of a whole. As they become more skilled, you progress to identifying smaller and larger pieces, finding equivalents and then onto adding pieces together to find the total. Start introducing fractional thinking, language and exploration activities to students at a young age in a way that adds to their perspective and vocabulary without requiring complex products.