Reply To: Lesson 5-6: Question

[Jennifer Maher]

I tried NCTM’s Unusual Baker task with my grade 5 this year. They were all successful with identifying the fractional amount for each piece of cake, but they really struggled with the proportionality of what to charge for each piece of cake. The total cost of each cake had to be exactly $10.00. So they would tell me that a half a cake could be $8.00 and a fourth of a cake could be $1.00. I realized that we needed more work in fractions as parts of a set, like the apples/oranges task in the book Student-Centered Mathematics. We really needed concrete experiences finding fractions of whole numbers and then fractions of whole numbers that would lead to decimal fraction amounts.

[Jennifer Maher]

I tried NCTM’s Unusual Baker task with my grade 5 this year. They were all successful with identifying the fractional amount for each piece of cake, but they really struggled with the proportionality of what to charge for each piece of cake. The total cost of each cake had to be exactly $10.00. So they would tell me that a half a cake could be $8.00 and a fourth of a cake could be $1.00. I realized that we needed more work in fractions as parts of a set, like the apples/oranges task in the book Student-Centered Mathematics. We really needed concrete experiences finding fractions of whole numbers and then fractions of whole numbers that would lead to decimal fraction amounts.