One great thing about blogs, you can reflect on what you have done in class, and remind you when you haven’t done a follow up you intended to do.
So, I needed to go back to What is 3/5. My students had made some good connections during that week and I wanted to see how much of it was retained. I went with a basic warmup today.
I decided on this because I really want students to expand their thinking past one basic shape for fraction representation. As I expected however, the first two diagrams students drew were circles and rectangles. I was pleasantly surprised when one student drew a pentagon.
At first I was worried when I was walking around the room, typical comments on why their figure was 3/5 included “3 out of 5 are shaded.” I am thinking, WHAT? We covered that fully just a month ago, how could they backtrack again? My worries were unfounded when for the last explanation students showed me they were indeed thinking of EQUAL parts, not just 3 parts out of 5. In the first responses it is easier to “explain” that way without fully relating everything. When I asked students to revise it so that I would know exactly what they were thinking, they came up with what a few students already had (as you can see in the student work photo):
3 out of 5 equal pieces are shaded
I am proud of them for remembering the concept and how to explain it so I could understand their thinking, and told them so.