Overview
The lesson is designed to help students understand the relationship between fractions, decimals and percents by using visual models of fractions. By exploring different types of fractions, students can begin to see the relationship that occurs and begin to translate between fractions, decimals and percents.
Objective
Each student will be able to explain using visual models how to represent fractions, decimals and percents including values greater than one.
Materials
Procedure
- Introduction: Ask students to think of other ways to model "one half." Keep a list on the board of student ideas, including equivalent fractions, decimals percents and visual representations. Connect these ideas to the upcoming activity by asking students if they could do this process with a more challenging value such as "one sixth." Allow students to think about this, then without asking for student responses, move onto the activity.
- Activity: Students will individually work through the handout. Throughout this activity students are comparing values and determining relationships between fractions, decimals, percents and visual models of these values.
- Conclusion: Ask several students to summarize the process with the class. What was learned? What questions do they still have? What was the benefit of using the online Fraction Model? Give an end of class period task where students show a value such as "one sixth" as a visual representation, fraction, decimal and percent. If they can't give an exact decimal value, have them give an estimate of the value.
- Extension: Have students come up with real life models of fractions. Are those models similar or different from the ones shown on the Fraction Model website? Are there any values that are difficult to model using this method?