One and a half small lessons

I've been trying counting circles in my Year 4 class. Mostly it's gone fairly smoothly, but interestingly when I tried it with jumps of one and a half a lot of the children found it a bit tricky.

We got there, but it was interesting to see there was a fair amount of faltering. I thought, I need to return to this. Maybe just on a plain number line.

Then I saw something interesting on twitter. It led to Kassia Omohundro Wedekind's blog post on  a similar thing. She had used "brownies" and half-brownies to help the same age children make connections.

It didn't provoke quite the same ideas in my mind, but it provoked ideas. Whole biscuits and half-biscuits would create an interesting pattern as they were laid down. Perhaps we could see what was noticed?

I think, @kassiaowedekind @ekazemi, I'll do a Biscuit Buildup like this, 1½ at a time. & then go back to number line pic.twitter.com/fMThvfedm3
— Simon Gregg (@Simon_Gregg) March 4, 2015

Well, it was just too jam-packed this week to fit this in. But I did have 15 minutes with the other Year 4 class, and I thought I'd give it a try. It's introduced here as a decimal activity, but I'd definitely started it off as a fraction one!


Once again, there were some hesitations and mistakes among the correct moves. Which tells us that it's worthwhile doing this. I'll recommend that both classes spend a little time counting in one-and-a-halves in a number of different ways.