Equivalent Fraction Rainbows for St. Patty's Day!

Did you wear your green?  I don't take any chances at school and make sure I'm wearing my green.  I don't need any students trying to pinch me.  This is the first year I've ever had to work St. Patrick's Day (it was always over my spring break when I lived in the Midwest!), so I'm not used to working on this day.

I had a meeting and a sub in the morning and then the afternoon FLEW by, so here's a short and sweet update.  Pretty simple St. Patty's Day for me...

I did nothing- you heard right- nothing to celebrate this holiday even though it is one of my favorites. I had no special plans.  No treats.  No big celebration or game or party or anything.  I was a total party pooper.  And we all survived just fine.  It was a boycott of sorts since I actually had to show up to work.

I was feeling just the tiniest bit guilty about that (and you know, a bit Irish as well!), so for math we made some equivalent fraction rainbows to keep things festive.

It was a spur of the moment idea.  Do you ever have those?  Those completely unplanned moments when you throw all caution and lesson plans to the wind and just go with whatever crazy idea you just came up with?  Luckily it worked really well.  We've been working through our fractions unit and so I thought it would be fun to rainbow our equivalent fractions in the hopes that it would help a few stragglers catch up with us and be able to see it in a little different format.  Whatever rule (and color!) we used to change the numerator, we had to use for the denominator.

After we were finished, we made observations and searched for patterns.  I think/hope it helped a few of my students to wrap their mind around this somewhat complex idea for fourth graders!

So there you have it.  An accidental-math-rainbow lesson.  Whoops!

            

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