During meals, Bryan and I like to construct overarching diagrams that we hope the kids use to construct models in their head of the world.

The topics are things like pirates and fairies and lumberjacks, but the content is secretly math.

white board full of fractions and decimals another white board full of fractions and decimals

We construct these over days, and then do problems with them. Fairies were allowed to visit Dad’s Pizza Kitchen and order how much pizza they wanted. We compared and added and subtracted fractions. Until one day Mr. D from the United Decimals of America came to Dad’s Pizza Kitchen, who didn’t understand fractions and got very cranky when you spoke to him in fractions. So you have to translate to decimal.

I realized that fractions and decimals connect when 1 is divided into 10 parts, and then it lines up pretty well. When 1 is divided up into a 100 parts, it lines up with percentages. To teach is to learn twice.