Origami and Fraction

Origami has always been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember, growing up in Indonesia, but I never thought it is a great way to help learn Math, specifically fractions until recently. Last week, when one of my iSucceed Math students was working on fractions asked me about whether each of her fingers is one fifth or is it one tenth! I asked her what she thought of that. She was convinced that because she has five fingers on one hand that one finger represents one fifth of her whole hand! When I asked her what characteristics fractions have, she looked at her hand/s. I was looking for the equal part of course. She then told me that one finger is part of her whole hand. This student is from Ethiopia and has always been so brave to ask questions without worrying what her peers may think of her. She is also in my Read 180 program. I love her curiosity!!

I wished that I had some of those round fraction manipulatives!! I could have used other manipulatives but I decided to take some colored 8.5 X 11 paper and all five of them came to the table, they were also curious and perhaps wanted to take a break from their computer work. I asked them to fold it in exactly half, then into another half, and into another half and open it. I then asked them to draw lines on the foldings and asked them to count the parts and write the fraction in each of the spaces. They saw the equal size of each spaces and finally told me that one of the rules of a fraction is to have equal size for each part.

I asked if her finger is one fifth of her hand.......she said no....... with a smile:) and added that her fingers are not of equal size!! I believe that she ate the mango! She didn't only help herself, but I feel that she also helped the others to remember. I will certainly review with her after the vacation.

Unfortunately I can not get to the national library of virtual manipulatives on these computers because the computer programmings are taking all the memory.........:) I know that in the nlvm there is a section for fractions. I agree with Shawn that it is a very good site for students to learn Mathematics.

NCTM conference

Is anyone planning on going to the NCTM Conference in Boston next October?
http://www.nctm.org/conferences/content.aspx?id=18223

triangles

I was so excited working with triangles this week as I was trying to come up with a way to have kids discover the rule that the interior angles of polygons add up to the number of sides minus 2 times 180. With my math team we started with octagons and then tried other polygons. We made triangles from the center of the octagon out to each angle. The had done enough investigation to know that the interior angles of a triangle equal 180, so they used this knowledge. Of course they first just multiplied the number of triangles by 180 and then we talked about the angles around that center point. Brilliant! 

With my 4th graders, some of whom were having trouble distinguishing acute and obtuse angles, I went to the wedge. I provided them with 4 in x  4 in squares and we used them to measure angles. Smaller than the wedge was acute, larger than the wedge was obtuse. This was far more effective for most than the paper patty protractors we had made. They hadn't had enough experience for the protractors to make sense. Now they are working on investigating different triangles like we did on Thursday. I had several kids come up and ask me, "Is it possible to make a right equilateral triangle?" I am amazed at how successful all of my kids are using the 4 x 4 wedge and creating right, isosceles, scalene, acute, obtuse and combinations of these triangles. The excitement continues......

web site for ten frames

In our 1st grade group at the muster yesterday, I mentioned an interactive website that has a ten frame activity on it. I use it on the Smartboard, but it can also be used with a PC or laptop. It's NCTM's Illuminations site and offers several activities to support what children K-12 are doing in the classroom. There are numerous ideas under lessons and activities, as well as additional ones under Web Links that look promising for all grade levels. For my first grade colleagues, the five and ten frame is under activities, pK-2. My students love to do these during their choice time, as a rotation during Everyday Math Explorations, or at the end of the day waiting for the bus.


http://illuminations.nctm.org/

Angle Vocabulary

There was a question at the April coach session about naming angles that are greater than 180 degrees, but less than 360 degrees. On the "ask dr. math" website, they list the name as a "reflex" angle.

While there, as usual, I stumbled across something new I didn't know. I knew that 90 degrees is a right angle, 180 degrees is a straight angle.........

....two angles that add up to 90 degrees are complementary, two angles that add up to 180 degrees are supplementary............do you know what the name of 2 angles that add up to 360 degrees is?

Check out this link for the reward of an answer:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/63015.html

Subscribing to the blog

Hi everyone,

I went to the very bottom of the main blog page. At the very bottom, there is a place to subscribe to: Posts (ATOM).

I clicked that link and made it a subscription to "Live Feeds" as a bookmark.

I added it to my bookmark toolbar and it shows me the list of recent posting. When I click on one of the posts, it opens up the blog for me. After I have read something the 3 arcs become a capital B.

I did not find a way to send it to e-mail. If anyone does find that, I'd love to know how.

~Shawn