Hi guys, I’m so excited! Now that my Summer has finally started, I got down business with my Silhouette Portrait (a paper cutting machine that does amazing things!). Another teacher introduced me to the world of possibilities that a Silhouette brings into the classroom and I just had to get one (thank you Miriam!).  I wanted to do something for fractions, for the first grade level, to help students to read fractions… literally.

This is my Silhouette Portrait

I remember my students asking me about the purpose of the vinculum so I made each of the fractions in these posters to include a vinculum with the words ‘out of’ within it. A half really means one out of two equal parts. Similarly, a quarter means one out of four equal parts.

I did not have to print anything at all from my printer. I put different colors of card-stock into the Silhouette which was connected to my laptop. Every Silhouette comes with a program that you can use to make your own soft-copy creations. The silhouette turns it into a hard-copy by cutting out the outlines of your image on paper. In my case, it was the numbers, rectangles, the offset-outline and letters on each paper, that got cut out. Then I punched out each cut-out from the rest of the surrounding paper, layered the colored cut-outs and glued them down.

I also did the circular fraction models for halves.

I made a center out of this. All of the parts here are separate pieces that can be matched up to show ‘halves’ or ‘one half’. I keep them in this folder.