Recently, I teamed up with Math For Love to bring an idea for a scaled set of pattern blocks to life. The result was the creation of Upscale Pattern Blocks.
(You can read the origin story of this new set of pattern blocks here).
Dan Finkel (the founder of Math for Love) has created some Fraction Talk images that take advantage of the new, scaled pattern blocks and posted them in a free lesson on his website.
The images are also available on this site under the “Manipulatives” photo gallery.
This year, I was honoured to be asked by Christina Tondevold to submit a webinar to the Build Math Minds Virtual Summit 2019.
In it, I describe the history and emerging community behind the Fraction Talk idea, website, and activities. You can find the full webinar (along with some support materials) in this Google folder. Continue reading
One of the earliest Fraction Talk ideas to come from the community of teachers that took up the idea was that of Fraction Talk War. As described in this earlier post, teachers began to use Fraction Talk squares in familiar game structures such as war to elicit student decision making. I have received numerous website replies and social media notifications from teachers who have used this idea with their learners. Initiatives like these are what makes online teaching communities so powerful: Somebody has an idea and we all can run with it in ways that fit our learners’ needs.
Enter Carla Dawson.
This last week Graham Fletcher (among others) alerted me to a twitter thread posted by Jo Morgan. In it, Jo posted a series of activities from an old textbook she had come upon (The book seems to be part of a large series from the late 1920s & early 1930s: Fundamental Arithmetic, by P. B. Ballard.)
Cover posted by Jo
The most exciting thing about creating Fraction Talks has been the range of ways that teachers have morphed them into any number of engaging activities for students. I have done my best to keep up with the innovation, but it is becoming an impossible task! It has been inspiring to watch the collective creativity get to work on a what is becoming a global project. Continue reading
A previous post expanded upon the possibility of using Fraction Talk images with(in) the structure of Which One Doesn’t Belong? The feedback from this amalgam has been overwhelmingly positive, and it got me thinking about how a teacher might go about composing similar prompts. Continue reading
If you are unfamiliar with Which One Doesn’t Belong?, you need to become familiar with it. It is an incredibly powerful framework to kids noticing, talking, and making mathematical meaning.
One of the coolest experiences involved in curating a list of ideas on this site has been to see how people have altered them to fit their learners, classrooms contexts, and pedagogical stance.
This one came out of left-field for me. Continue reading
This post details how Fraction Talks has been combined with a critical grade school understanding: the number line. It is an amazing mash-up of resources, and one of my personal favourite ways to use Fraction Talks in the classroom.
The combination of Fraction Talks and Clothesline Math has been elegantly combined by Erick Lee. His post describes the benefits of both classroom structures and provides downloadables for ease of implementation. The link to his post can be found here. Many thanks to Erick for his vision and creativity! Continue reading
This post is designed to offer one road to implementation of Fraction Talks as a productive routine in your classroom. Like anything in the classroom, the lived experiences will cause twists and turns. The best plans are altered and (sometimes) laid to waste.
If student thinking triggers action that perturbs the progression… follow it as you are comfortable. Continue reading