Description
What our Fractions on a Number Line lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Fractions on a Number Line expands students’ understanding of fractions by teaching them to view fractions as parts on a number line, rather than just an object broken into pieces. The lesson uses the terminology whole and parts to introduce students to numerator and denominator. Several examples are provided for the teacher to demonstrate to the students, as well as activities the students can do for individual practice. At the end of the lesson, students will be able to locate fractions on a number line between the interval of 0 and 1. This lesson is for students in 3rd grade and 4th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the blue box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.
Options for Lesson
Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. One optional addition to this lesson is to have your students use a banana and cut pieces of it to create the fractions provided by the teacher. Your students can also practice their number line by becoming a human number line on a piece of tape with fraction cards. Finally, you can have your students color fractional representations during the lesson to help prepare them for the homework.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
FRACTIONS ON A NUMBER LINE LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Fractions on a Number Line
The Fractions on a Number Line lesson plan includes two content pages. Fractions are the parts that make up a whole. For example, think of a cookie as a whole. If you want to share it, you might cut it into two pieces, or halves. Those two parts make up the whole cookie.
Fractions are the units between whole numbers on a number line. Number lines often have smaller marks in between the whole numbers. The focus of this lesson is fractions between the interval 0 and 1. The interval between 0 and 1 is the whole. It can help to think of this interval as a whole cookie or a whole pizza.
We can divide the whole into as many parts as we want, but these parts are always equal to each other. The number of parts (b) becomes the denominator of the fractions. The numerator is how many of the parts you count over on the number line.
The lesson shows a number line divided into eight parts. The first mark on the line represents 0 and the last mark represents 1. Because it’s divided into eight parts, our b value is 8. If you want to find 3/8 on the number line, you count three marks over from 0.
The lesson includes two more examples, showing how to find 2/3 and 4/5 on a number line following the same steps as above.
FRACTIONS ON A NUMBER LINE LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Fractions on a Number Line lesson plan includes four worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, a homework assignment, and a quiz. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.
SNAKES ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
For the activity worksheet, students are given a number line and playdough. They will roll out a “snake” with their playdough that is the length of the number line. They will use this to model different fractions, including halves, thirds, fourths, and eighths.
Students will then use these models to compare different fractions that the teacher writes on the board.
MISSING FRACTIONS PRACTICE WORKSHEET
For the practice worksheet, students will first fill in the missing fractions on each number line. They will then look at dots on number lines and will write down the fraction that each dot represents.
FRACTIONS ON A NUMBER LINE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
The homework assignment asks students to
QUIZ
This lesson also includes a quiz that you can use to test students’ understanding of the lesson material. For the quiz, students will look at number lines and fill in the missing fractions.
Worksheet Answer Keys
This lesson plan includes answer keys for the practice worksheet and the quiz. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
