Give Me Half!

Stuart J. Murphy

Australian Curriculum:  Description

This story is about a brother and sister who are asked to share all their food and drink; pizza, cupcakes, drink etc

Teaching ideas
(1) Read the story and describe what's going on in each picture; (2) vocabulary-half, whole, share, divide, divided equally; (3) gather materials (objects, quantities and collections) and discuss how you would halve them; (4) draw pictures of objects in your classroom, and lines to show 'half'

Maths Curse

Jon Scieszka

Australian Curriculum:  Description

3-Tell time to the minute and investigate the relationship between units of time (ACMMG062); 4-Investigate equivalent fractions used in contexts (ACMNA077); 5-Choose appropriate units of measurement for length, area, volume, capacity and mass; 6-Continue and create sequences involving whole numbers, fractions and decimals. Describe the rule used to create the sequence (ACMNA133)

Teaching ideas
There are lots of concepts explored in this book that could be extrapolated and explored further; (1) time, (2) timelines; (3) multistep problems; (4) conversions between units; (5) fractions; (6) cross KLA references; (7) charts, (8) binary, (9) Fibonacci; (10) money

My Half Day

Doris Fisher and Dani Sneed

Australian Curriculum:  Description

Yr2 – Recognise and interpret common uses of halves, quarters and eighths of shapes and collections (ACMNA033); Yr3 – Model and represent unit fractions including 1/2, 1/4, 1/3, 1/5 and their multiples to a complete whole (ACMNA058)

Teaching ideas
Year 9s could even read this book and be asked to place all fractions mentioned on a number line from smallest to largest. Year 2/3 ideas - have students match the abstract (5/8) to a picture/scenario from the story. Explore and investigate other examples of fractions in the real-world.