Five Ways to Use Craft Items to Help Your Kids Get to Grips With Fractions
Kids often learn things easier when the learning activities are fun. So, when it comes to helping your children get to grips with fractions, consider inventive and fun ways of teaching them what fractions are and how they work.
For instance, there are various ways in which you can use everyday craft items to teach your kids about fractions. Here are five that you will want to consider.
1. Use Playdough to Teach Your Kids Fractions
Playdough is not just for molding. It can also be an educational math tool!
Simply encourage your child to divide balls of playdough into different fractional parts. For example, you can start with halves and thirds one day and quarters and fifths the next.
Cutting playdough serves as a model for partitioning holes into equal parts, which is an essential fraction concept.
2. Make Paper Pizzas
Kids love both pizza and paper crafts. So, help your children to create “fraction pizzas”, using paper circles that are decorated to resemble their favorite foodstuff.
Once your kids have created their paper pizzas, you can cut them into halves, quarters, eighths, and so on. Fun paper pizzas offer a concrete way for kids to visualize and understand fractions. They will quickly grasp how a half equals two quarters or four eighths, for example.
3. Create Sand Jars
Another fun method to teach fractions is by using jars and sand. Use clear jars and colored sand to represent different fractional parts of a whole. The whole is represented by the total capacity of the jar. When your child fills up a portion of it with one color of sand, that act serves as a visual for understanding a fraction.
4. Craft Paper Plate Clocks
By making clocks out of paper plates and items like lollipop sticks for hands, and breaking down each hour into fractions, time-telling becomes educational in more ways than one.
For instance, you could teach your kids that each hour is divided into 60 minutes. Therefore, 15 minutes is 1/4 of an hour. With a paper plate clock, kids can move their hands to understand the fraction of an hour that each minute value refers to.
5. Make Fraction Flowers
The beauty of nature can be a great artistic muse for kids. It can also help them understand fractions. To craft fraction flowers, your child would need to make a circle out of cardboard or thick paper to act as the flower’s center and add petals to place around it.
Once your children have made their fraction flowers, assign each petal a fractional value depending on how many petals make up the whole flower. For example, four petals would mean each is 1/4, six would indicate each is 1/6, and so forth.
Need More Fraction Help?
The above methods are great ways to introduce your kids to the fascinating world of fractions, but at some point in their learning journey, you should delve deeper. For example, you might like to teach your children how to compare fractions.
Thankfully, there are some great online platforms that make learning fractions easy, fun, and convenient. For instance, Smartick’s fraction comparison lesson is perfect for teaching your kids about comparing fractions.
Final Thoughts
Using playdough, making paper pizzas, creating sand jars, crafting paper clocks, and making fraction flowers are all excellent ways to help your kids get to grips with fractions. But now that you have some practical examples of the ways in which you can use craft items to teach fractions, you can come up with your own ideas, too.