Olympic Mathematics - Fraction flags for Year 3-6

Credit to Jade from Ballajura PS for many of these student work samples.

Story:

You hit it big selling handmade crafts at your local market - so big that you end up earning a trillion dollars! You decide to buy your own country and enter the Olympics. But what will your country's flag look like?

Tools:

• Grid paper (preferably 1cmx1cm)

• Coloured pencils.

Main event:

The International Flag Commission (IFC) contacts you - yes, that organisation exists (in this story at least). The commission specifies the rules for all new flag designs:

• At least 3 different colours in each flag

• A different amount of each colour in each flag

• 7 different designs for the commission to consider your application.

Create some options on grid paper and work out the fraction of each colour that you used.

Pro tip: Use a recommended overall size for the flag and make this is a composite number that is often easy to simplify, such 4 rows of 6, 3 rows of 6, 3 rows of 5, 4 rows of 5, making the array rectangular to match the real-life appearance of a flag.

Pro tip: Model how to simplify fractions, focusing on keeping the colours together. For example, if you use 9 out of 18 squares for yellow, that looks like half of the flag, so 9/18 = 1/2 (9 eighteenths is equivalent to half).

Support

Try two colours only at first and focus on halves. Use an overall size of 4 rows of 3 to get started (12 as the total number of grids in the flag design).

Extension

Use different overall sizes to create diverse equivalent fractions. Record matching percentages and decimals by thinking $1 (if it takes $1 to produce a mini replica of this flag, how much of that $1 or 100 cents does each colour cost).

If the yellow is 1/4 of the flag, think $1 shared between 4, which is 25c, so the yellow is 25 per cent or 25% or 0.25.