Fractions for five-year-olds? Piece of cake
|
Version 0 of 1. What’s 1,652 divided by 28? In a couple of years’ time, your 10-year-old will be expected to work this out – without a calculator. And as a reward they will get a miserly two marks, so long as their workings and answer are correct. The new curriculum, which started today, is moving primary arithmetic up by what looks like a quantum leap, and for those children, teachers and parents who already find maths difficult, this is going to be scary. It will start young, too. Children aged five are going to be introduced to fractions – a year or two earlier than they used to be. This news has caused much consternation but the truth is many children are already exposed to fractions at a young age. “How old are you?” I asked a boy yesterday. “I’m three and a half,” he said. Without being taught fractions, this boy had some important knowledge already: he knew three and a half was less than four even if he didn’t have a firm grasp of what a half was. My youngest daughter, Josie, is about to start in reception and it’s her fifth birthday next month. There will of course be a cake. And cake (as well as pizza) is God’s gift to learning fractions. I think Josie already knows what half a cake looks like. She certainly knows what half a banana is, though when I cut a banana in two she always wants the bigger “half”. Through the everyday medium of dividing food, fractions become a natural concept that any five-year-old can grasp. All parents need to do is draw attention to the fractions as the cutting takes place. This also sets the foundation for later on, when children will be expected to do things like multiplication of fractions. What’s ½ x ½? Another way to say that is “What is half of a half?”, and in the form of a cake you can already picture the answer. Put this way, maybe fractions aren’t so tough after all. They can be real and tangible, and make sense. However, there are other parts of the new curriculum that will be more demanding. Many children will find the emphasis on pencil and paper arithmetic taxing and I expect there will be more tears at bedtime. On the other hand, many children will be more than up for the challenge. In recent years we’ve been a bit timid about exposing children to demanding mathematical ideas, fearing they won’t understand. I remember asking a teacher when my eldest daughter would be learning how to calculate three-sevenths as a decimal. His reply was: “For calculations like that, they can use a calculator.” Yet she, and many of her peers (aged 10), were quite capable of learning the short division method, and in doing so they would have discovered that three-sevenths produces a pattern of numbers 0.428571428571 … that repeats forever. Infinite patterns are just one way that maths can capture the imagination of a primary school child. I am reminded of a lovely exchange in Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time, which I’ve shortened slightly: “I left the class doing algebra,” said Susan. “Algebra?” said Madam Frout. “But that’s far too difficult for seven-year-olds!” “Yes, but I didn’t tell them that and so far they haven’t found out,” said Susan. |