Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, I wrote this post way back in 2011, and I’m updating this Chocolate fractions lesson to be a bit more useful than my random ramblings from over a decade ago. It was a delicious math lesson, so I now return you to Past Ticia 2011.
This week we started studying about Pennsylvania. One of the things I learned about it while I was researching the state is Hershey chocolates are from there.
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Hello, yummy math time, right? Especially because I remember having a Hershey Fractions book when I taught, so let’s get some chocolate!
Supplies for Chocolate Fractions
Sadly, the Hershey’s Fractions book is out of print, but the book just gives you the framework, you can do this with just:
Hershey’s chocolate, one for each kid
In theory, it could be any other chocolate that is sub-divided like Hershey’s is, it’s just the one I used since I had the book.
Also, it’s a classic.
Teaching the chocolate fractions lesson
So, we went through and followed the directions in the book and learned about the different fractions in a chocolate bar.
It amused the heck out of me to see Batman (I’m kind of assuming this is him, it certainly looks like him, but……) take the directions run with it, and create artwork in his fractions.
Future Ticia 2024 butting in, since you probably won’t have the book.
The book starts with a whole candy bar. That is 1/1.
From there you start dividing the candy bar into different fractions by breaking it in half 1/2.
Then break each of those halves in half to create 1/4. We can then put two 1/4s together to create two 1/2 fractions. Fairly simple, right?
Then each of those 1/4 can be broken down into individual pieces 1/12. You can put the 1/12 pieces together to see how 3/12 is the same as 1/4.
You can rearrange these pieces into different groups and see all the different fractions you can make from this.
Back to Past Ticia 2011
It was also amusing to me to watch as the chocolate pieces slowly got smaller and smaller as little kids licked their fingers.
The book was a little long for Princess’ attention span, towards the end she was staring at the chocolate with complete fascination. But, overall they did well.
Future Ticia 2024 would like to point out she was four, so very good attention span AND self-control to not eat the chocolate.
And then there were some very happy kiddos as they happily devoured lots and lots of chocolate.
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