As my youngest has been learning more about different fractions and my oldest is trying to get her head around decimals, I kept trying to think of MORE activities that the two of them could do together.  And as the kids have been playing around with shapes a lot lately (we are loving out Dive into Shapes set) I wanted to do a home-made activity with shapes and fractions, something along those lines but I was stuck, completely stuck on what we could make together. And then I remembered an Easter Egg card that we made a few years ago and I realized we could do a similar activity but include our fractions and instead of sticking the shapes onto a card we could stick the two ends together.

We started by cutting out a lot of circles and squares (all the same size) in different coloured paper (the paper we used is thicker than normal printing paper).

Both kids wanted to try the circles first.  They divided the circles into equal shapes – first by folding them and then drawing the lines in – and on each circle they labelled the equal segments.

Once all the circle had been labelled we started glueing the halves together (you need to glue the 1st half of the 1/2 circle to the back of the whole circle and glue the 2nd half of the 1/2 circle to the 1st half of the 1/4 circle and continue until you glue the last circle to the very first piece – in our example the 1/8 circle ends up being attached back to the whole circle).  The end result is that each time the kids turn to the next circle they see new fractions.

You could add as many circles as you want (my son included a whole, 1/2, 1/4, 1/6 and 1/8)

My daughter did the same thing except she labelled her circles with decimals.

And we did the exact same thing using squares.  With the squares the kids also added in thirds. And the nice thing about doing it a second time I could see both kids were more confident with how to fold and divide the shapes equally, how to glue all the bits together and my daughter did not need to keep checking which decimals numbers needed to go where.

It really is easy to set up (coloured paper, scissors, glue, pencil and ruler) and it ends up being a great learning activity.

Please bear in mind all activities are made by my kids and so are not going to look perfect.  The blog is a blog showing ideas on how we learn at home.  I also try and take photos without disturbing their activities.

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