On Monday I got out some play dough and shaped it into squares to represent brownies. Then we worked together to figure out how we could cut each "brownie" into fractions, such as fourths, sixths, and fifths. As students worked, I asked them to put into words the strategies they were using. At the end, the students agreed that it was easier to cut the "brownie" into an even number of pieces, as they could start by cutting it in half. Fifths proved the most difficult.
Then we learned the game Uncover from Marilyn Burn's About Teaching Mathematics: A K-8 Resource. It is the opposite of the game Cover Up which we learned a couple of weeks ago. This time we started with our whole piece covered by the two half pieces. We rolled the fraction cube to see which piece we could remove. Students had a choice on each turn of removing the piece that represented the fraction they rolled, trading one of their pieces in for equivalent pieces (e.g. trading a half in for a fourth and two eighths,) or passing.
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