Fractions greater than 1

I started the lesson talking about how many thirds, quarters, fifths etc made a whole and the children made the relationship between the numerator and the denominator being the same for a whole.

I then showed 5/4 on the board and got the children to discuss what this meant and how it could be represented. We revisited what the / sign actually means and they were able to explain it was 5 divided by 4. We used the concept of 5 pizzas between 4 children - so each child would have a whole pizza and the extra pizza would have to be cut into 4 and 1/4 given to each child. We then talked about other ways of showing 5 quarters.

Because of all the work we'd been doing on bar models, one child came up with the following diagram almost immediately. Again this clearly represents that 5/4 = 1 1/4.