Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Dinosaur Fractions
























This is what we call "Dinosaur Fractions". Christian,(6 years of age) loves playing with his dinosaurs. Somehow as we were playing restaurant with the dinosaurs, there was a need to explain fractions. From this point on he always asks to play dinosaur fractions and now he really knows his fractions!!!

This was a natural approach to learning. It evolved out of our play. :)

Here is how it works - We start with one dinosaur in the restaurant. Another dinosaur approaches. We only have 1 sandwich in the restaurant. First we must count how many dinosaurs we have and then figure out how may parts we need to divide the sandwhich to feed the dinosaurs. We pass out the labeled fraction parts to the dinosaurs. We show how the individual fraction parts equal a whole and then clean up. In comes, the next dinosaur. Now instead of two dinosaurs we have 3 and it keeps going all the way up to 10 dinosaurs.













In the picture above, we had 4 dinosaurs in the restaurant. So, we had to divide the sandwich into 4 equal parts.
Here, you can see how we show that 4/4 equal one whole.

















Here are all the other fraction parts we use. These are magnetic fractions. I'll have to remember where I bought them and I'll post it.

No comments: