Fractions, decimals and real life!

We quickly noted down the year of each child's arrival at our school. There are 20 children in the class. They started here as follows:

Reception: 1
Prep: 1
Grade 1: 1
Grade 2: 3
Grade 3: 1
Grade 4: 4
Grade 5: 9.

We put them into fractions:

After checking that they added up correctly we simplified the following fraction making sure that we divided the numerator by the same number as the denominator:



We aslo looked at the fractions to find which fraction of children:

•  arrived between Reception and Grade 2
• arrived in Grades 3 and 4
• arrived between Grades 3 and 5
• arrived between Grade 1 and Grade 5

In each case we were able to simplify the fraction. We then used the fractions to work out percentages. We found that:

• 30% of the class arrived between Reception and Grade 2
• 70% arrived between Grade 3 and 5
• 25% arrived in Grades 3 and 4
• 90% arrived between Grade 1 and 5

We also found that 45% of our class arrived in 5th grade.

This was a great way of using children's knowledge and experiences to explore fractions and decimals. We added fractions, we simplified, we ordered (according to size) and we changed fractions to percentages.



Apologies for the photographs. My technical expertise in terms of writing fractions using a keyboard is sadly lacking. I hope you can read what the photographs show.