Fractions and Decimals

We decided to extend Halloween just a few more days this year. Mrs. Segura's students are working on awesome projects where the third grade students are opening a toy store, the fourth grade students are opening a donut shop, and the fifth grade students are planning a holiday party. This allows each of the grades to work with decimals when they deal with money and budget. In order to connect two ideas, I started our lesson with fractions and then tied it into decimals. Some of the concepts found in this lesson I got from Jana Shumway's Fraction Lesson.

I first assigned each student to either a witch, zombie, ghost, or werewolf group. Then I would yell out commands such as, "All the witches create a low shape." After the witches went to the middle and hit their low shape I would ask the class, "What fraction of the class is in a low shape?" and allowed the students to answer. We did this activity for a while as the fractions got increasingly harder. Then I switched places with a student and allowed them to decide what fraction of the class did what movement.

After the students got the hang of activity we went to the whiteboard to convert common fractions into their decimal form. I especially tried to emphasize the decimals that would relate to money like 1/4 = 0.25 which is equivalent to a quarter. After we converted a few fractions, we went back into the space and did the same activity we did with fractions, but this time the class had to answer me with the decimal value. The 5th graders did great with using the proper place values and saying 0.25 as twenty-five hundredths.

Then I gave each group a paper with a dance already choreographed for them. However, the choreography included both fractions and decimals such as, "0.25 of the dancers do sustained movement in a high level while 0.75 of the dancers collapse and roll to the side of the room." or "1/8 of the dancers freeze in a medium level shape while 7/8 form a low, twisted shape around the frozen dancers." Each paper had quite a few commands and I told them to memorize the dance. I was very impressed with the students memorization and the dance turned out wonderfully. I had never seen the students perform so quietly!

We then were able to talk about what other fractions and decimals we deal with in the world. We were able to connect with money, and the students figured out what fraction of their family was male or female. When we first started this lesson the third graders were not too thrilled to be doing math. However, once they began moving and were able to create their dance they were having fun, and I think they really enjoyed it. We'll see how they like doing a different lesson this week involving even more math!

Action shots of the student's choreography: