Teaching ideas

• Practical

You could work through this with the class.

When you get to 1/8 this is more difficult as students will have to shade half squares. They should end up with 12 1/2 out of
the 100 squares shaded.

Encourage them to write this as 12.5/100 and then ask “How many would be shaded if each hundredth was divided into ten squares to get thousandths?" They will see that the answer is 125 and so it can be written as 125/1000 or 0.125.

Also show that 1/8 is half of 1/4 and 1/4 = 0.25 so half of this is 0.125 because 12.5 is half of 25.

•   Fractions to decimals (Teaching resource sheet 9)

This link displays some decimats and leads students through changing a quarter to a decimal.

•   Decimals make great fractions (Teaching resource sheet 10)

This link displays some decimals in place value charts and their equivalent decimat diagrams and fractions.

Example:

Students are asked to write them as fractions.

•   Denominator 10, 100 and 1000 - cancelling (Teaching resource sheet 11)

This link displays some fractions with denominators of 10, 100 and 1000 and asks students to fill in the missing numbers to
cancel them.

You will need to be able to project this onto a write-on surface.

•   Making the denominator 10, 100 and 1000 (Teaching resource sheet 12)

This link displays some fractions and asks students to fill in the missing numbers to make them into fractions with denominators
of 10, 100 and 1000.

You will need to be able to project this onto a write-on surface.

Teacher notes

• Students need a sound understanding of decimal place value and simplifying fractions before doing this section.
• Materials such as decimats divided into hundredths as well as tenths are an excellent way to show the relationship between decimals and fractions.
• Once understanding has taken place encourage students to learn some of the basic equivalences such as
  0.125 = 1/8   0.333… = 1/3   2/3 = 0.666… etc

• It is important that students realise that decimals are the equivalent of fractions with denominators of 10, 100, 1000 etc. If a fraction cannot be made into an equivalent fraction with one of these denominators then it cannot be described by an exact decimal (terminating decimal).
• It is very important that students realise that fractions and division are linked. Students may not be aware that 2/3 = 2  l  3.
• Remind students to always give fractions in their simplest form.
• Encourage students to discover that 0.4 is the same as 0.40 and 0.400.
• Fractional expressions have equivalent decimal and percentage expressions.