Fraction Art

Advanced Preparation:  You will need blank white paper, construction paper, tracers, pencils, scissors and markers.

The purpose of this activity is to have the students focus on the connection to a whole shape and halves and quarters of shapes.  The students will create a picture by using wholes, halves and quarters of different shapes.  They will also be asked to label the shapes as 1, 1/2 or 1/4 using standard fractional notation (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.G.A.3).

I have included a video (Introducing Fraction Art) of how I introduced this activity to the class.  It is 4 minutes but truly captures how to introduce the activity to the class.

The basics of the activity:

*Students use templates to trace shapes onto construction paper.

*They then cut the shapes of 1/4s. 1/2s, or leave them whole.

*They label the part accordingly (1/2, 1/4. or 1)

*They then glue the shape onto a bigger piece of paper and create an picture with their shapes.  

Students will now work on their own pictures.  As students are working, I will circulate to see how they are dividing shapes and notating the fraction.  I will ask students questions that will require them to use language such as half of or a fourth of and also relate the smaller parts to the whole (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.G.A.3).  

In this situation the students are making sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations by breaking a whole into smaller but equal parts. They bring two complementary abilities to bear on problems involving quantitative relationships.  The students understand that the smaller parts added together make the sum of the whole (CCSS.MATH.PRACTICE.MP2).  This is evident when they take a whole shape, cut it into equal parts, and then label the parts of the original whole.

I gather the students back on the carpet and grab a couple examples of students' completed pictures (Completed Picture 1 & Completed Picture 2).

"I would like to take a look at some of your pictures.  Let's look at the first one (Completed Picture 1).  Why is there a 1 on the red circle?  What about the two triangles?  Why are they each labeled 1/2?  What do the two halves make?"

 I continue to ask questions that relate the fractional parts to the whole and refer to the fraction notation.  I then repeat the process with the second picture (Completed Picture 2).

In this case the students are describing the whole shape as two of, or four of the shares. They are also demonstrating an understanding that decomposing shapes into more equal shares creates smaller shares (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.G.A.3).