Half of Half of Half of a Piece of Toast
Breakfast fun with fractions!
ADDED February 03, 2010
I've started doing something with my kindergartner that is turning out to be a nice introduction to fractions, I think. He just thinks it's funny and interesting.
At breakfast time, we cut his piece of toast in half. Then we leave one of the pieces alone and cut the other one in half again.
We repeat this process: we leave one of the new pieces intact and cut the other one in half. (This gives us two pieces that are now one quarter the size of the original piece of toast.)
We keep doing this: leaving one piece and cutting one piece.
In this way, we create:
half the piece of toast
a quarter of the piece of toast
an eighth
a sixteenth
a thirty-second
Sometimes we can even get down to a sixty-fourth!
As I said above, this toast trick is just an introduction to fractions. We're not learning higher math here.
But my son is really learning the concepts.
He understands that there can only be two halves.
With the smaller pieces, he understands what information is communicated by the names. He has learned that if you need two halves to make one whole, you need eight eighths to make a whole.
I'll ask him: if you have one sixteenth, how many more sixteenths do you need to get back to the whole piece of bread? I'm proud to say, my boy answers correctly.
At the same time, this kind of educational playing with our food is fun for him. He likes to see how many pieces we can cut from the piece of toast. He gets quite excited by the teeny, tiny pieces we cut. (He keeps encouraging me to make a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth, now that I've mentioned that as a possibility of continued cutting.)
While he's having his breakfast, I take a blank piece of paper and fold and rip it into quarters, eights, sixteenths, and so on. Together we move the pieces around to learn about fractions and their relationships. For instance, we'll put four eighths together to make one half. Also, we'll re-arrange the eighth-sized pieces of paper to show how half the size of a piece of paper can take on many different shapes -- all of them are still half the paper!
We hope you enjoy the ideas presented here and that you go off to have some fractional fun in your house. We hope your kids like eating one-thirty-second-sized pieces of toast -- and that you have a whole bunch of great family time together!
(We'd like to offer at least seven eights of a bunch of thanks to L. Marie for the small pieces of paper photo above. Okay, actually eight eighths.)
| ages 5 and above, good at home, good for mealtimes, |
Share this . . .
Comments
Post Comment
