For this math lesson, I broke my students into small groups and allowed them time to play with tangrams to explore how the shapes fit together. Once they had about 5 minutes to play, I asked them some guiding questions to begin discovering fractions.

• How many times does the small triangle fit into the larger triangle? 
• How many times does it fit into the small square? 
• If the small triangle fits into the small square 2 times, what fraction of a small square is a small triangle?

Of course these questions were basic for my 4th grade students, but I wanted them to determine that although all the shapes are different sizes, each shape can be measured using the smallest triangle. 

Next, I let my students play again! I gave my students 5 more minutes to play with the pieces but told them that by the end of the 5 minutes they must have some sort of picture created with the blocks. This picture should not have more than 10 pieces, and should include at least 3 different colors of pieces. I showed them this picture of a house as a simple picture I made using my requirements. 

Once each group of students agreed on a picture, I first went around and took a picture of each one. This is mostly because I didn’t want someone to bump the table and the kids to not remember what color piece went where. With the images documented, I had my students pull out their math notebooks to answer the following question: What fraction of your total picture is each color?

Answering was a challenge for many of my students. Even with the guiding questions at the beginning, I had students tell me that in the picture on the right blue is 3/10th of the total because 3 pieces were blue out of 10 total. But with some patience and some partner work, most of my students came to quickly understand this misconception and determine a strategy to accurately answer this journal prompt!