Fractions of Quantities
3 maths worked on representing some fractions with numeratos of greater than 1 in different ways.
This is what they came up with.
Maths at Paganel
Fractions of Quantities (chocolate)
Inevitably, chocolate came out today as we tried to understand fractions of quantities.
Dividing up pieces of a bar of chocolate between the 3maths students helped make the link between division and fractions, and confirmed times tables knowledge is an excellent pre-requisite skill - those who could quickly recall that 8x8=64 could answer the questions more quickly than those who weren't so sure of there times tables.
Next time - we will be looking at equivalent fractions having watched the Khan Academy video on the subject.
Fractions of quantities
Today the children in 3maths were looking at fractions.
Using properties of shapes, they tried to represent different fractions - 1/4, 3/4 1/5 and 1/3.
The pictures show some of the representations they came up with.
Using protractors
The first step in using a protractor is undetstanding that just as a ruler measures length and a measuring jug measures capacity, a protractor measures an angle - a measurement of turn or rotation marked in degrees.
When using a protractor you need to remember to move the centre of the protractor to the intersection of the two lines you are measuring, line up the base line with the base of the protractor and measure the angle by using the scale that counts up from zero.
Think of a number: inverses
The children worked in pairs on whiteboards to think of a number, perform two operations and ask their partner what the number would be. They were practising using inverses.
Division by Chunking
This morning we compared long division with division by chunking. We decided that the skills and knowledge involved in long divison (i.e. Place value, column subtraction, column multiplication) are far more complex than those involved in chunking (multiplication by 10 or 100, column addition).
Completely Stuck on Long Division. How can we do 4915 ÷ 26? #mathchat
We're trying to work out the best way of doing
4915 ÷ 26
Does anyone know any good ways of doing this?
Does anyone know any cool ways of doing long multiplication? #mathchat
We're a bit stuck on this multiplication:
493 x 63
We're going to try to use Grid method to solve it, but does anyone else know any other ways of doing it?
Japanese Numbers and Place Value: who else wants to ban the word 'ten'?
Having learned about Mayan numbers yesterday, today we moved on to Japanese. Mr Philp pulled out an ancient book from a course he'd done ten years ago - the Numeracy Strategies' Developing Mathematics in Years 4, 5 and 6L the 5-day course. In that book was a sheet of information about Japanese numbers which you can see attached to this post.
(download)
The children saw how Japanese has a really logical system to it - words that support the actual number system, whereas English has some words that act as barriers to understanding the base 10 nature of our number system. For example, Mr Philp would like to ban the word 'ten' and replace it with 'ty'. He would also like to band the teens numbers. Then our numbers would be different from above nine like this: nine, ty, ty-one, ty-two, ty-three, ty-four, etc. There would also be some slight adjustment to the tens numbers, so that twenty would become two-ty, thirty would be come three-ty and so on.
The students wrote some numbers out in Japanese, working out how the hundreds, tens and units work as shown in the picture.
The overriding thought as we left the room was - if only we'd all learnt to count in Japanese.
Mayan Maths
We used this article from the NCETM website to inspire today's maths lesson.
Looking at Mayan numbers we saw how their numbers changed at 19, instead of 9, like ours do. This means than instead of place value being in thousands, hundreds, tens and ones; their place value was in eight thousands, four hundreds, twenties and ones.
We also noticed that they had invented their own symbol for 'zero' - something the Romans had failed to do at around the same time in Europe. Mr Philp noticed that a few members of the group struggled with their zeros in place value - either adding them in the wrong places or taking them out where they are still needed - this was be a focus for further work.
Can you write the Mayan number for this year - 2012? Is there anything special about that? No? - If not then why did the Mayan's think the world was going to end this year? Would they have started at the same zero?
