Time: 15-20 minutes a day
The following series of activities with fractions gives students practice with fractions, allows you to check their understanding and their ability to manipulate fractions, and gives students a chance to articulate what they know. It also shows the value of review and over-learning; students will notice as it gets easy to answer questions similar to the ones that were difficult the week before. Students should find most of these questions easy, because they are doing many examples of similar questions until it seems easy. If every question is hard, they will be reluctant to go to the board. Every day only a few questions should present some challenge. You can tailor the questions to suit your students, asking more questions similar to ones they are learning, or skipping some questions that they are finding too easy or too difficult at the moment. For some students you can repeat one day’s activities for several days, using different numbers.
When students can give a correct response quickly and easily, that is the time to ask them to explain their thinking, since usually the skill of talking about math lags behind the skill of doing math. This means that students of different abilities can be working on the same content area with the same questions: for some at a lower level, just doing the work is the job at hand; for others at a higher skill level, articulating the process is the job that requires work and keeps the interest high.
When students are familiar with the process, ask a student to "be the teacher" and read the instructions for other students to follow. The challenge of checking that student responses are correct, while running the group process and noticing patterns, will be interesting math experience for some students whose skills in doing the math are more advanced than most of the group.