# Savile Park Primary School

## Fractions, decimals & percentages

Understanding what fractions, decimals, and percentages mean is essential to be able to calculate and solve maths problems quickly. They will also come up all the time in later life, from dealing with money to cooking.

At the end of primary school, children sit mandatory tests in arithmetic and reasoning. Although these may seem a bit daunting, children build up to these by slowly improving their maths skills through the primary years. So, your child will progress from simple tasks like recognising halves and quarters in Year 1 to multiplying and dividing with fractions and decimals in Year 6.

There are a variety of simple things you can do at home to support your child’s developing understanding of fractions, decimals, and percentages.

## How to help at home

You don’t need to be an expert to support your child with maths! Here are three simple but effective ways to help your child develop their understanding of fractions, decimals, and percentages.

### 1. Fold paper fractions

Cut out shapes such as squares, triangles, rectangles, or circles. Try to find fractions of the shapes by folding.

Can a shape be folded into two, three, four, five equal parts? Investigate different ways to make fractions. For example, can you fold the shape diagonally?

## 2. Shop for decimals

Explore fractions as decimals when shopping together. Encourage your child to compare prices or dimensions with the same number of decimal places, for example, items costing £1·67 and £1·76. Can they say which number is bigger and explain why?

### 3. Link fractions, decimals and percentages

Play matching games to help your child understand that decimals and percentages also show fractions. Write some common equivalent values on sticky notes, for example 0·5, $\huge&space;\frac{1}{2}$, 50% or 0.25, $\huge&space;\frac{1}{4}$, 25%, and hide them around the house for your child to find.

Noticeboard

There are no upcoming events to display at this time.