Any elementary school teacher will tell you that teaching their students fractions is one of the most difficult exercises that they can perform. At this age the young student’s relationship with numbers is a tenuous one. The standard use of pie charts and colored bar sections while effective for some students, sometimes a more innovative approach is needed to help their understanding of fractions and their equivalents.

Try this:
Take an ordinary fish bowl and place in it a number of peppermint candies (or any type of wrapped candy that you wish) making sure that the number in the bowl is evenly divisible by the number of students in your class. Have each student take a number of cadies out making sure that each student has at least one. Now tell them the total number of candies that were in the bowl and that everyone must have the same amount as each other.

Example: 20 students = 20, 40 or 60 candies with each student ending up with 1, 2, or 3 candies.
Now that each student has their fraction of the total, the teacher can now physically move the students into groups which can represent fractional relationships.

Example: If each student has one out of 20 candies you can have the divide the class into 10 students each which one piece of candy. They can quickly see that each set of 10 represents half of the total of 20 candies. Further manipulations can quickly result in understanding the relationship of partial number to the whole. At the end of the exercise the children can eat their fraction of the whole.

At this age children need concrete examples of what fractions mean and what the relationship is between different fractions, this little exercise will not only give the children a visual and physical representation but a nice reward afterwards.

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