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When A Half Isn't Enough!: Denise Neal

The document discusses teaching fractions to young children in early childhood education. It argues that fractions should be taught from a conceptual understanding perspective starting in early childhood rather than just focusing on procedures. Some key ideas that can help build understanding of fractions for young children are that objects can be divided into parts, fractions can represent parts of a whole, numbers exist between whole numbers, and fairness requires equal sharing or partitioning. The document provides examples of activities like sharing teddy bears into groups that can help young children explore fractional ideas in a meaningful way and build connections between fractions and division.

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78 views3 pages

When A Half Isn't Enough!: Denise Neal

The document discusses teaching fractions to young children in early childhood education. It argues that fractions should be taught from a conceptual understanding perspective starting in early childhood rather than just focusing on procedures. Some key ideas that can help build understanding of fractions for young children are that objects can be divided into parts, fractions can represent parts of a whole, numbers exist between whole numbers, and fairness requires equal sharing or partitioning. The document provides examples of activities like sharing teddy bears into groups that can help young children explore fractional ideas in a meaningful way and build connections between fractions and division.

Uploaded by

assajadda lizikri
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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When a half isn’t enough!

Denise Neal
Department of Education, Tasmania

Teachers are constantly striving to teach for understanding of key mathematical ideas and
teaching for depth and conceptual understanding is now being seen as an important part of
successful mathematics teaching. However, we know that many students still have many
mis-conceptions and shallow procedural knowledge of ideas such as fractions and decimals
and percentages in secondary schooling.
How then might we teach for deeper understanding of these “big ideas” and how are the
foundations of such understandings appropriately laid in the early years of schooling?
Obviously, drilling children in procedures and rules at an early age is not the answer.
What might the understandings be that young children already have which we can build on in
the K-2 years and what be might appropriate learning experiences and teacher interventions?
This paper has been written to engage early childhood teachers in asking some questions
about the mathematical ideas which underpin understanding of fractions and reflecting on
their current practices.
Traditionally fractions have not been part of any early childhood curriculum; ideas of
fractions were dealt with in the upper primary or early secondary curriculum. Why might we
consider them to be part of the mathematical experience of young children?
Young children know about halves in an intuitive and everyday sense- they often describe
themselves using phrases such as “I’m four and a half” and describe any item which has two
pieces as being “in half”. This is usually a response to hearing adult conversation using such
terms. Parents might say for example “I’ll cut your sandwich in half” or “it’s half full”. When
children are introduced to informal measurement at school they will often refer to anything
which is “left over” or not a whole unit, as “half”.
Is half enough? Should parents and early childhood teachers present other models of cutting
and partitioning? Do children then come to see half as more important or different to other
fractions, and does this make later understanding more difficult?
Researchers point to an over emphasis focus on half and quarters as a reason for many
children’s difficulties in understanding fractions (Newstead and Murray (1998).
The types of manipulatives used to introduce fractions may also lead to difficulties e.g. many
materials are pre- partitioned or involve “Count and colour” (e.g. shade 1/12 of this rectangle
(which is pre-partitioned)) activities which do not lead to real understanding. In preference
students should be engaged in folding, cutting and dividing objects and materials to see
partitioning relationships and should be encouraged to visualize for example _ on a number
line.

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What might some key underpinning ideas for understanding
fractions be?
Single objects or groups can be divided into parts

A fraction can be used to represent part of a collection: eg. 4 out of 5 shots went in
There are numbers between consecutive whole numbers: eg. 1.5

You can share things into equal groups.

Fairness in sharing often requires division into equal parts.

When you divide things into groups, sometimes there are some left over and the
interpretation of this remainder will depend on the situation being represented

(Tasmanian K-8 Mathematics Guidelines for Number)

These ideas underlie any later work with representing, manipulating and thinking about
fractions and a focus on them will help build conceptual understanding about what
mathematical ideas provide a foundation for fraction investigations.

What might this look like?


Many early childhood classes present number lines to children. These usually start at 1 and
go up in whole numbers. Might we naturally introduce children to the idea that there are
many numbers in between whole number by talking about, modeling and adding number
(both sides of zero) to young children? Might this help children build a “big picture” of the
number system and might lower secondary teachers not then have to ‘un-teach’ children
about how our number system works, if children have come to them believing that 0 is the
smallest number and that the only numbers in between other number are halves? My
experience with young children tells me that if this is done in a meaningful and natural way
they can deal with the ideas. The number line can be added to over the year with new “parts”
of numbers.
If our teaching focuses on building connections for children- in this case connections
between fractions and division, important mathematical links can be made. This avoids the
problems of topics being presented as separate “bits” with no connections being built for
students.
If we present children with challenges of cutting, breaking and folding things into equal
groups they can build mental images for themselves and see relationships. This can be
supported by explicit focus from the teacher about the language we use to describe the pieces
and the processes being undertaken. One such activity I involved a class of six years olds in
was sharing out packets of Tiny Teddies fairly in groups of 4. As most small packs of Tiny
Teddies have 13 in them this created some dilemmas about what to do with the left overs! It
revealed some fascinating solutions, including one group of boys who decided to record their
answers and requested some help in writing a half and explored the idea using different
numbers of teddies.
We would of course, also continue to develop childrens’ real-life fraction knowledge by
talking about events involving fractions e.g. “it’s _ time in the football” , “The ball went in the

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goal 5 out of 6 times”, “we will cut the pizza into 5 equal bits” etc Parents can be encouraged
to do the same.

Summary
There are many early experiences of fractions which can be built into an early childhood
setting in natural and meaningful contexts and play situations. It is our role as teachers to
help build important foundational ideas which underpin later more symbolic work with
fractions. Knowing the mathematical ideas which underpin fractions, decimals etc is vital for
teacher planning and for building deep understanding.

Some questions…
What activities could you share through the Virtual Conference to help others explore
important ideas about fractions with young children?
How much symbolic language do children need to be exposed to?
What materials have you used which build understanding of fractions?
What can we do to build conceptual understanding of fractions for all students?
What aspects of current practice create difficulties for students when they meet ideas about
fractions?
What research can inform our thinking about fractions for young children?
Is half enough?

References
Newstead and Murray (1998) summed up the factors that contribute to the poor
understanding of fractions as follows:
• The initial presentation of fractions to children — both the way and the sequence in
which the content is presented to them. For example, the use of pre-partitioned
manipulatives and are restriction to halves and quarters only.
• A lack of opportunity in the class to resolve and monitor misconceptions (sometimes
based on incorrect intuitions) that children might have.
• The tendency of children to apply their whole-number conceptual framework to
fractions, interpreting a fraction as two whole numbers.
(available at http://www.wcape.school.za/malati/Files/Fractions993.pdf)
Tasmanian K-8 Mathematics Guidelines
(available at http://www.discover.tased.edu.au/mathematics/k-8%20number.pdf)

Click here to join the discussion on the AAMT Bulletin Board

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