General Chat

Couldn't agree more Ann, he has had it explained but was too scared to say he didn't get it, bless.

Good Luck to TF and 9 year-old - glad I'm far too old to have children at school - except my daughter who teaches Media at Further Ed! Jx

It sounds to me as if he needs a lot more practical help.
If I were you I'd let him cut things like cakes and pies into portions.
Buy bars of chocolate and work out how many pieces there are and see if they will divide into numbers of people.

Some children pick it up very quickly and I would expect a 9 year old who has been taught properly and who has done a lot of practical maths to be able to do it. However a lot of kids panic and can't visualise things as actual objects. In that case the teacher needs to think of another way of explaining it.
If a child in one of my classes didn't understand a maths concept I used to see it as a failing on my part not in theirs.

Good luck and let me know if he needs more help.

Have fun on this site........some great help there.
www.coolmath4kids.com/

I see some good pages on equivalent fractions.

Sue
x

Hi everyone, thanks for all your help, Sue - I have just explained and he is flying along now and has nearly finished. He took one look at it and panicked like you say, thankyou for your straight forward explaining, what a wonderful teacher you must have been!

Once again, thank you everyone!

TF

Hope you don't mind me coming on - just taught this topic to my Year 7s!!

Equivalent fractions are fractions which are all the same size in real terms, but expressed in terms of different sized bits. eg in terms of cake (or pizza!), if you cut it into 10 equal pieces, then we call the pieces tenths and half of your pizza would be made up of 5 of those pieces. This means that 5/10 and 1/2 are 'equivalent' because they represent exactly the same amount of pizza - it's just been cut differently.

Have fun!
Janice

This topic is so appropro today, as last evening my 8 year old granddaughter was in tears over a graph, of which I could NOT make sense. I am reasonably intelligent I think, but the questions she was asked didn't make sense to me either. New terminology perhaps. She's trying to learn with ADHD and if I am totally distracted by it, I'm sure she is significantly more so!!

I wish when homework is sent home, that there would be adult-friendly instructions for those who help in the evening.
Mary

Don't mind at all Janice, just used pizza as an example, little one has just finished and is jumping around the room, whooping about this cool website for family tree stuff and the brilliant people on here!

Bless!

Hi Mary,

I know where you are coming from, funnily enough I am off to SATS evening tomorrow for this very reason....so much has changed since we were at school,

Great!

That website looked well worth saving for help and making maths fun.

I did "sums" with smarties and toys and anything I could think of when my kids were preschool. They liked "take aways" best when they ate them!

My younger daughter was really bright at maths and absolutely loved being asked to do little puzzles in her head. When she was about 3 we were driving along and she asked us to give her some hard sums to do. We asked her what was a half of 5.....and she knew straight away. At which point I knew she was going to be a handful to teach! LOL

Sue
x

when My grandaughter was very young and I had a beeb micro.
we had some education discs which she loved......

!!To get wrong,!!


deliberately,
because the failure noises were more attractive than the pass ones!!!

Bob