Star Wars Fractions: Quarters

Following on from our ‘Star Wars Fractions: Halving‘, we moved on to look at quarters. A quarter is one of four equal parts of an object, shape or quantity.

Resources

Dry erase crayons
Lego characters
Log slices with numbers written on
Base ten set

Method

1/4 and 3/4 of 40

Ioan was keen to use some of his Star Wars drawings in some of our fractions. They started off by counting how many pictures made up their whole.

To find one quarter (or 1/4) of 40, they grouped them in to four groups of ten.

Once Ioan and Finn had worked out that 1/4 was 10/40, I asked them to work out what three quarters (or 3/4) of 40 would be.

I asked Finn, to explain what he understood by finishing of the sum I had written: 1/4 + 3/4 =

Finn knew that 1/4 + 3/4 = 1 whole.

I checked Ioan’s understanding by asking him to show me what that meant using his ten rods.

You can check the answer by adding the fractions back together to make a whole. 1/4 + 3/4 = 1 whole and 10/40 + 30/40 = 40/40 = 1 whole.

1/4 and 3/4 of 8

To work out his quarters of eight, Ioan grouped his Star Wars Lego into four equal groups. His denominator (bottom number) for both fractions was 8.

As before, he circled one of his groups. This was one quarter. To get the numerator (top number) he counted up how many characters were in one group. There were two characters, so 1/4 of eight is 2 and 1/4 = 2/8.

For more on the numerator and denominator, see ‘Star Wars Fractions: Halving‘.

3/4 of eight is 6, meaning 3/4 = 6/8.

To check: 2/8 + 6/8 = 8/8 = 1 whole.

1/4 and 3/4 of 12

As above, he worked out that his whole. Then to work out one quarter of twelve, Ioan grouped his Star Wars Lego into four equal groups. The denominator for both fractions was 12.

To work out the numerator, he circled one quarter and counted the characters up. 1/4 of twelve is three, so 1/4 = 3/12.