The purpose of this activity is to engage the students to use their knowledge of fractions and additive strategies to complete a whole.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A pirate shares some of his treasure.
He gives ¼ to the cabin boy, ¼ to his first mate and ⅓ to the girl who feeds his parrot.
How much of his treasure does the pirate have left?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student nominates the amount of money in the treasure chest and calculates fractions of that amount to find the pirate’s share.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student draws an area diagram to determine the shares of each crew member.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student uses a clock representation (circular region) and divides the region up to determine the share for each crew member.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/share-spoils at 8:51pm on the 26th February 2024