Fraction Puzzles – Product Swap and Giveaway!

We all know teachers are magic, but it seems that this time of year, our magical powers need a little extra umph and a maybe even an ABRACADABRA to get us to that last day of school!  So, I teamed up with some amazing intermediate bloggers to create some magic of our own!  You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, we joined forces to swap some of our favorite resources, armed with the goal of putting a little extra magic in our lessons and keeping our students engaged during these final weeks of the school year.

As promised, we’re all back today with Part 2 of our blog hop giveaway – the big reveal – viola!

I was very fortunate to be able to use Blair’s fraction puzzles with my students.   There are 32 puzzles in this set which make it perfect for using in centers.  I had anticipated having 8 stations in my class with 4 puzzles in each station.  Students would rotate through and complete the 4 puzzles until I announced it was time to switch.  Well, I had planned on doing this the day before our state math test and I had my desk all spread apart from the previous day’s reading test.  I found this to be a great time to mix it up a bit.  🙂   I had the students move their desks to the sides of the room to leave a big section open in the middle.

I passed around 1-2 of the puzzles per student and had them cut it out.  This was way easier and faster than it would have obviously taken me to do it all.  There are a bunch of little cuts in these!

Here you can see the pieces all cut out.  Notice how there are 4 pieces per puzzle – a fraction, number line, area model, and parts of a set.

Once each student was done, I walked around and collected each puzzle.  Then I walked into the middle of the room and threw it all up in the air. You should have seen their faces!  They immediately guessed that they would have to put all 32 puzzles back together.  Before starting we discussed how the class could work to do this.  One student had the idea to split the cards into groups – fractions in one pile, number lines in another, area models in another, and a pile for the fractions of a set.  Then, another student suggested we lay out all the fraction pieces around the room and then we could match the remaining pieces to them.  Those were great ideas, but I love the next one best…no talking!  One student suggested that they should try to do it without talking because she thought there would be too much noise, fighting, and confusion with multiple students talking at once.  They also wanted me to time them to see how fast it would take.

I had all the students sit in a circle around the mess on the floor. They quickly started sorting the pieces into piles.

The pieces are almost all sorted!

You can see here how they spaced out the fraction number pieces around the room so they can easily be found.

Now, each student went back to the remaining piles and started matching the pieces with the fractions.

They all worked really hard matching them up!

And they’re done!  This is just one section of completed puzzles.  There were more on the other side of the classroom as well.  They all worked extremely hard and had a lot of fun doing it.

Best of all, it only took them 15 minutes from start to finish!  They want to do it again to see if they could beat their time, but I told them we’d do it next week.    I’m so happy I tried these puzzles.  I feel like it was just that extra bit of fraction reinforcement before our test, and it was definitely something the kiddos were excited about doing!  You can find them at Blair’s TpT store HERE.

Now to our second round of magic giveaway!  We decided to switch things up a bit by having several winners this time around!   In fact, 14 classrooms will receive a little magic for their own classrooms!  Each of the blogs featured below will be giving their prize to a different winner!

So, perhaps you want to know what MY winner will collect!  Whoever is drawn as the winner from my blog will receive $5 towards my TpT store AND this End of the Year Memory Book.

Stop by each blog to read about all the magic that has been spread around classrooms near and far!

Enter to win each blogger’s resource using the raffle below.  Each blog is showcasing the same Rafflecopter, so you can just add entries as you go!

While you are at each blog, if you’re not a blog follower already, sign on to follow!  (You can earn bonus entries for following all blogs once you unlock the additional entries.)

Swap Stop A

Swap Stop B