A Rainbow of Fractions

To introduce fractions, I encouraged my students to explore with the Fraction Tiles. These colorful pie-shaped fractions easily create a whole circle in units from 1/2 to 1/10. This helped to model a clear picture as to which fraction is greater. 1/3 or 1/8. There were lots of discussions of pie, the yellow 1/4 was quickly identified as lemon, the pink 1/3 was strawberry and the blue 1/2 was of course blueberry. I asked my students, "Which piece of pie would you like to eat?"..."The biggest one of course," they all replied.

 My students partnered up to play a game of war with the fraction tiles. They would each grab a fraction piece from their pile and challenge their partner, whomever had the larger fraction got to keep the other person's tile. This was a riot to watch! It started out slow and quickly ramped up as they started to identify which fractions were larger and how they compared to each other. I then showed my students how to create their own fraction circles using the colorful paint chip circles. They quickly knew just where to draw their lines by comparing them to the fraction circles. After we practiced dividing the circles up into fractions my students were ready to create some rainbow fractions. I printed some adorable clouds and used black baker's twine to attach them to the cloud. We created the cutest fraction rainbows that instantly brightened up our classroom walls. To get started have students lay their paint chip circles out in rainbow order red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple. Then start with one whole on the red circle, then 1/2, 1/3, 1/4,1/5 and 1/6. My students first drew their lines in pencil then traced over it with a black marker. Once they were done they hole punched them and strung them onto their clouds. We hung these on our desks for a while. They were easy to reference and really helped students visualize each fraction as they compared them with their daily assignments. When they were no longer needed the clouds made a cute addition to our spring bulletin board. For more practice with fractions we tried using rainbow candy . Each student took 8 pieces then sorted and counted the pieces. In their math journals they drew their candy and wrote the fraction for each color. For example, if 3 of the 8 pieces were red there were 3/8 red candies and so on. This part was a fun treat! My math super stars just loved a little hands-on fraction fun! Teaching fractions doesn't have to be a struggle. Try one of these colorful ideas and your students will master fractions in no time!