Food for thought? More like food for Maths!

Yet again we have been doing something fun and exciting in Diamond Class. This week we have been looking at fractions in Maths. Fractions can be very tricky for children to understand but using food is a great way to represent these.

We used a tube of smarties to try and investigate what colour is the most popular in a packet. Avoiding the temptation to eat them, the children had to count how many they had in their tube. Did you know a tube of smarties ranges from 28-30 smarties? The total number of smarties became the denominator in our fraction.

Then, we had to sort them into each different colour. We chose a colour to count and then the total of this colour became our numerator. For example if there was 28 smarties in a tube and 5 of them were purple this would be 5/28.

We couldn't believe that the number of each colour varies from tube to tube! Some of us had no red smarties whilst others had 5 or 6! I feel a complaint letter looming...

Miss Anderson