And i’m pootling around help sites but i can’t find what i need. I’m going to have to get the teaching book, but i need to see my way through this a bit more quickly. We’ve followed what the book has told us to do so far, but now it seems to have dropped us without the crucial step.
1/6 of 5 = 1/6 x 5
We’ve learned to do 10 divided by 6 which gives us 6 lots of 1 with a remainder of 4.
Now i’m stuck on how to give her a fail safe way of getting the remainder divided up into the groups. She’d started putting the remainder on top of the denominator, which so far appears to work, but i don’t know why and i’m not convinced it will carry on doing so! So what is the final step, or would she be better off doing something else completely?
Is that a typo at the top? 1/6 of 5 is NOT 5/6 x 5! 1/6 of 5 is 1/6 x 5 (which is 5/6).
As for the question – yes, you can always put the remainder on top of the denominator. That’s what division means. Ten divided by six – think of ten cakes or something, to be shared amongst six people. One way of doing it would be to divide each one into six pieces, then each person would get 10 x 1/6 which is 10/6 or 1 and 4/6. Or you give each person one cake , and have four over. They also have to be divided by six people, so you could cut each one into sixths and each would get 4/6 of what’s left…
Does that help?
Ah yes, i didn’t see it but i’ve corrected it now; just a typo 🙂
I think i see what you mean, but i don’t see how my nine year old got there before me!!!!
I know exactly how your 9 year old got there before you…. she hasn’t had a lifetime of being told “now this is really hard but try and understand it anyway” whereas most of us who went to school did! She cna just look at it and say1 oh, it must be this”
I used to be good with fractions, but you’ve lost me!
C and I both got stuck on one of her maths questions yesterday too, and had to give it up as a bad job.
Just get the text book Merry! Much easier to describe fractions with nice pictures of watermelons etc 😉
Jan – c’mon, we’re curious now!
MPH4B p62 – challenging practice – it was obviously too challenging for me too. 🙂
I often find that adding in more words to describe things helps me to grasp them. Probably because I’m a more wordy person than a mathsy one. So, I’d say to myself “one sixth lots of five”. Dani says that sounds more confusing to her – but it works for me!
Jan – have taken this to twitter!