Equivalent Fractions | Fractions | Fractions KS2 | Fractions Games | Practical Fraction Activities

Welcome to learning more. Today we're thinking about fractions and we're just going to look at a really quick little resource that you can make which will really help your child discuss fractions, compare fractions and really understand that idea of equivalence. It's my little take on a fraction wall. I like to call it fraction straws and it's very very simple to make and actually a lot of fun to make it as well. Aaron and I made one of these this morning and we had loads of fun doing it. So just all you'll need is some pipe cleaners, some straws, some little sticky labels or a permanent marker if you want to write on the straws and it's really very simple to make. The idea is that you're basically cutting your straws up to make your fractions. So I got a straw, I bent it in half to make halves and cut it in half and then I'm just going to thread it on to my pipe cleaner. Even this in itself is a really good fine motor skill and actually quite soothing. So once you've done that you can make your halves, you can make your thirds, quarters, fifths, eighths. If you want to go on to making tenths I would suggest maybe those lovely big long arch straws and you can use whatever straws you like. I would recommend though when you're doing the thirds and the fifths that you do use a ruler to measure the result because you do need this to be accurate otherwise it doesn't work. So just how you would use this, so for example I might ask a child to find me a fraction that is the same as a half and at this point I would be discussing with them the idea that it might be more than one, so it could be two quarters, it might be two thirds and actually get them thinking about that idea and it's just a really nice practical resource that children can use very visually. So what I would be doing is showing them the pipe cleaner, splitting my half off because I only want one half and then getting them to use the other straws to actually look at and compare. So I've got my half and I now want to see if a third is bigger or smaller than a half and immediately I can see that it's much smaller. I'm going to try two thirds, two thirds are far too big so I know that thirds are not going to be equivalent to a half and I might move on to quarters. I might try one quarter first and you can clearly see that one quarter is not the same as a half. I might take two quarters and I can see yeah my two quarters are the same so I can say that one half is the same as two quarters and it's a really nice resource for showing that idea of equivalence. It's also great for comparing fractions so for example you might ask what is bigger one fifth or one quarter and again immediately you can pull off one. The lovely thing about using them on pipe cleaners is you can separate what you want off so I'm going to separate off one fifth and I'm going to compare it with one quarter and I can clearly see that one quarter is bigger than one fifth. So it's a great way of really helping that level of understanding with children and comparing the fractions because it is a very difficult concept. So I hope you enjoy using your fraction straws and if you do want to see more of them in more action there are more videos on the channel so do check those out.