Equivalent fractions, taught nine ways.

Year 4 are making a class fraction quilt for the maths wall. Each child opens the teacher's template in Microsoft Paint, a 4 by 4 grid of sixteen squares, and uses the fill tool to design their own patch: half the squares in one colour, a quarter in a second, and an eighth each in a third and fourth, arranged in any pattern they like. Beside the patch they type each colour's fraction twice, once in sixteenths and once in its simplest form, such as 8/16 = 1/2. Last year the class made the same patch from coloured gummed-paper squares, swapping them round until they liked the pattern before sticking them down. The teacher prints the patches and checks the fractions after the lesson, and the class arranges them into one quilt on the display board, spotting patches that look very different but share the same fractions.

Tools: Microsoft Paint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 4 make a class book called Our Fraction Families in Book Creator, one page per child. Each child chooses a family, such as 1/3 = 2/6 = 4/12, draws it as bars or circles with the pen tool and records a voice note of up to a minute explaining how they know the fractions are equal, listening back and re-recording until the explanation is clear. The teacher checks every page, and the finished book stays in the school's Book Creator library, shared with families through a private link the teacher controls, with first names only and no photographs of children. In the next week Year 3 listen to the book on the class tablets as they begin their own work on equivalent fractions.

Tools: Book Creator Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two lessons, Year 4 build a program in Scratch, on class accounts managed by the teacher, that shows whether two fractions are equal. The teacher gives each child a starter project with one ready-made block that draws a rectangle of a given width, and shows how a repeat loop can draw a bar cut into equal parts. Each child writes the rest: their program asks the user for a numerator and a denominator twice, draws both fractions as bars of the same length one under the other with the right parts shaded, so the user can see whether the shaded amounts line up, and children who finish add a third bar. Children test their programs with fractions a partner chooses, fix bars that do not line up, and end by using their program to check three families they wrote in their books earlier in the week.

Tools: Scratch Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

After a lesson on fraction walls, Year 4 practise spotting equivalent fractions in a Seesaw activity the teacher has built from the class's usual worksheet. Each of six pages shows three shaded bars, circles or squares, and children drag a fraction label onto each shape and then circle the two shapes on the page that show the same amount. Page six holds a trap, 2/3 beside 3/4, which look close but are not equal. Children work alone while the teacher works with a small group at the fraction walls, then the teacher looks through the submitted pages after the lesson and plans the next day's starter from the ones most children got wrong.

Tools: Seesaw Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Midway through the unit, the teacher runs a live Kahoot on the board, with Year 4 joining on the class tablets under names from Kahoot's friendly nickname generator, so no child's real name appears. Each of the twelve questions shows a fraction-wall picture or a pair of shaded shapes, and the wrong answers come from common errors, such as choosing 3/5 as equal to 2/4 because both numbers went up by one. After each question the board shows how many children chose each answer, and when several pick the add-one answer on question five, the teacher pauses the game, brings out the fraction wall and shows that adding the same number to the top and bottom changes the amount, then carries on. The teacher uses the end-of-game report to pick a group for extra fraction-wall work the next day.

Tools: Kahoot! Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

A week before this lesson, Year 4 chose three places to test, the classroom windowsill, the school hall and the book corner, and the teacher left a micro:bit in each, powered from a USB plug and running a MakeCode program that logs the light level every ten minutes, day and night and through the weekend. The teacher has loaded all the readings, about 3,000 of them, into a Google Sheet, with a summary tab that has one row for each day and 24 cells in each row, one per hour, shaded yellow where the light was on and grey where it was dark. In pairs, children count the lit hours for each place on each day, write them as a fraction of 24, and then mark the hours off in groups of two, three, four and six to find the same fraction with smaller numbers, such as 12/24 = 6/12 = 2/4 = 1/2 for the windowsill. They hunt for surprises, such as hall lights on for part of Saturday, check each one against the ten-minute readings behind it, and put a question of their own to the log, such as which place was lit for the largest fraction of the weekend. Each pair ends by explaining one fraction family to the class and what it says about that place.

Tools: micro:bit, MakeCode, Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 4 are meeting equivalent fractions for the first time. The teacher plays a four-minute animation on the board, chosen in advance on YouTube and shown full screen, in which a chocolate bar is snapped into halves, then quarters, then eighths, and the narrator shows that one half is the same amount as two quarters and four eighths. The teacher pauses it at each new split so the children can draw the bar in their books and label the pieces. Afterwards the children draw the three bars one under another, colour the matching amounts and write the family 1/2 = 2/4 = 4/8, before moving on to fraction strips on their tables.

Tools: YouTube Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher projects a GeoGebra applet showing a bar with three quarters shaded and a slider that doubles, triples and quadruples the number of equal parts. As the teacher drags it, the bar is re-cut into 8, 12 and 16 parts while the shaded amount stays exactly where it was, and the fraction beside it changes from 3/4 to 6/8, 9/12 and 12/16. The teacher repeats this with 1/2 and 1/3, pausing to ask what the class notices about the numerators and denominators, and children answer out loud and on mini whiteboards. They finish by writing three fraction families in their books and a sentence on why the shaded amount never changed.

Tools: GeoGebra Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 4 know the Moon changes shape but have never watched a whole cycle. The teacher opens Stellarium on the board, sets the location to the school's town, switches off the ground and the atmosphere so the Moon stays in view, locks the view on it and runs time forward from one new moon to the next, a little under 30 days, in about two minutes. The class watches the lit part grow and shrink, then the teacher runs it again, stopping at the dates for each eighth of the cycle, worked out before the lesson; at each stop the children name how much of the cycle has passed, and at 2/8 the teacher points out that astronomers call this the 'first quarter' Moon even though it looks half lit, because a quarter of the cycle has gone. The class then names fractions nobody has drawn for them, such as 3/16 and 5/16 of the way round, and the teacher sets the date for each so they can see the Moon at that point. Children draw the eight Moons round a circle in their books, label each with its fraction of the cycle and write the families they found, such as 2/8 = 1/4 and 4/8 = 2/4 = 1/2.

Tools: Stellarium Nine ideas for your own version in Generate