Since I have younger kids most people would think I stay far away from fractions for school time, but in all honesty with 2 boys there is really plenty of opportunity to work on fractions during and outside of school time.
The first lessons in fractions really started even before we began our homeschool sharing... Simple tasks like sharing became "you get half and your brother gets half" or "since there is 4 of us we would each get 1/4 of ......." those lead into money is fractions, etc... Bringing basic fractions into our school day and week even has been fairly easy too. We homeschool 4 days a week so Cameron learned that he could divide his Math unit into 4 parts and do 1/4 of it each day and to make it a little more exciting I only have him would on his phonics 3 days a week so we quickly learned 1/3 of the unit...
We won't get to fractions in our actual daily math for another year but we are learning to incorporate fractions into living math.
Nathan loves working in the shop with his Daddy where tools are either metric or standard measure. He soon learned that 5/8 is larger than 1/2 and 9/16 is larger than 5/8... He may not fully understand what they stand for (5/8 of an inch, etc...) but he understands that fractions can seem like one thing but really be something different.
We try to bring life learning into all subjects but Math always seems to make its way into the boys lives and for that I am grateful.
You're doing a great job of incorporating fractions into daily life!
ReplyDeleteThanks for joining in Math Monday!
Cariann, thanks for the post. I agree with you that fractions should be a natural part of young children's lives, een if they haven't yet appeared in their level of the school curriculum. I feel that for some reason fractions are left too late in contemporary curriculum documents.
ReplyDeleteWhat an awesome introduction to fractions. Your sons will find fractions in their math curriculum so much easier, since they actually understand how they work in real life.
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