Fractions Eight Different Ways

Learning Intention: Students will understand that there are many different ways to express the concept of ‘part of a whole’.

Success criteria: Each student will produce a poster that demonstrates eight different ways to express a certain fraction, chosen by the distribution of individual fraction cards. We will use these cards and our ‘Fraction Walls’ to demonstrate adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions.

Each student will recieve a card with a fraction and create a poster that shows this fraction eight different ways (as above for one half). When you have finished, place your poster on the number line in the room.

Operations with Fractions

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You already know that when you multiply a whole number by another whole number, the answer is a larger number. But when you multiply a fraction by another fraction the answer is smaller! Look at the top picture – if you have 2/5 of a pizza left and you need to share it equally with your brother, how much of the original pizza do you get? How can you add 1/3 and 1/6 of a pizza?

Adding and Subtracting fractions – BBC Bitesize

Multiplying and dividing fractions – BBC Bitesize

How to Add and Multiply fractions – WikiHow

Week 3: Basic Operations

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This is a picture of a mechanical calculator, common in Europe in the 1960’s. Imagine using one of these in school! We are lucky now to have very cheap and efficient electronic calculators that can do quite sophisticated operations. However, it is still important to have automatic recall of number facts – like when collecting change at a shop, calculating wages and saving for something special.

This week we will be practicing basic operations – multiplication tables up to 12, indices, order of operations (BODMAS) and short division. In Year 8 we will be doing operations with negative numbers. There are several FREE apps that you can access on mobile devices to practise basic operations:

  • ***Wishball (place value, adding and subtracting)
  • ***Motion Maths Hungry Fish (addition)
  • ***Motion Maths Wings (multiplication)
  • King of Maths
  • Times Tables Quiz!
  • IXL Maths Practice

***I have tried and recommend these ones, but there are lots more available. Choose one, tell me about it and let me know what you think in the comments below.  Please continue to work on your Mathletics activities and Mathsmate worksheets (due Friday).

Week 2: Factors, Multiples, Squares and Primes

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This week we will review the definitions of the following terms:

  • Integers: Positive and negative whole numbers (not decimals or fractions)
  • Factors: Numbers that can be divided into a larger number with no remainder.
  • Multiples: The resulting number of multiplying two smaller numbers.
  • Square numbers: When result when you multiply a number by itself (eg. 3 x 3 = 9)
  • Prime numbers: Numerals with only two factors – one and themselves.

Resources:

Please write ten examples of each of the terms listed above. Use the following numbers to create a ‘factor tree”: 24; 120; 128; 130; 240; 360; 480.

We will practise our multiplication tables and learn more about prime numbers using the game “Multo”.

My favourite Middle Years Maths sites and resources

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This year I will be teaching both Year 7 and Year 8 students Maths in our small, rural school in SW Victoria. With relatively small class sizes and 1:1 BYOD we have great opportunities to engage students with high quality digital resources that help to foster a love of Maths learning.

Or, in the case of some teenagers, make them hate it a little less? Let’s face it, I work with adolescents every school day, and many of them haven’t yet found their passion. They have strong opinions about what they like (“Call of Duty” and One Direction, for example) and what they hate (mostly homework, uniforms and algebra). CoD and ID are much more relevant and useful than…..whatever.

So, to get on with this post, my intention is to share the middle years Maths resources that I find most useful, hopefully because students find them authentic, relevant or just plain fun, while addressing curriculum statements.

My Most Useful Sites and Resources:

  • ABC Splash – high quality resources, aligned to the national curriculum.
    • ConCensus – This game uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to allow users to make graphs and diagrams using selected postcodes and categories.
    • Choose Your Own Statistics – This interactive activity has ten different categories (including demographics, weekly wages and homelessness) with infographics and a tool that allows users to visualise the data.
    • Area of a Triangle – a cartoon interactive that assists students to learn and practice the formula for calculating the area of a triangle.
    • Algebra – it’s a piece of cake – a series of eight videos that explain some simple algebraic concepts using a “number crunching machine”, recipes and simple patterns.
  • National Library of Virtual Manipulatives – Huge range of applets across all areas and age groups. (If you have difficulty accessing these interactive animations, try a different browser, update or enable your Java).
  • NRICH – enriching mathematics – Great problem solving activities for a variety of ages.

Welcome to Year 7 and 8 Maths for 2015!

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There are three areas in the national curriculum that we will study in Maths this year:

  1. Number and Algebra (Terms 1 and 4)
  2. Measurement and Geometry (Term 2)
  3. Probability and Statistics (Term 3)

Year 8 Maths (Term 1)

Year 7 Maths (Term 1)