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Teachers TV
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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.
Just a Fraction
A successful method of teaching fractions to primary students is vividly captured in Just a Fraction. This Teachers TV video follows a group of seven year old students at Janvrin School in Jersey. The technique used is visualisation using paper cups cut into halves and quarters, cards representing different fractions and two tables. The students are invited to write down a mathematics ‘story’ on a white board. Demonstrators drawn from the class then play out the mathematics story with paper cups. They move on to see how cards containing the usual notation for fractions can be transported in the same way. By the end of the lesson, some children understand the concept and can go from the concrete to the abstract, but still visualise the concrete when they are unsure of a calculation.
This video demonstrates:
• How to introduce children to fractions using concrete representation (cups)
• How to move from the concrete to the symbolic (number cards)
• How to translate symbolic ability to abstract thought
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