Use this teaching resource when teaching your students about fractions.

Students imagine they are going on a picnic. They decide whether there will be a total of two, four or eight people at the picnic. The worksheet provides images of a number of different ‘picnic’ foods. Students choose which items they would like to eat, then colour and cut these out. For each food, they then decide whether they would eat the whole item or cut it into halves, quarters or eighths to share with the other people. They cut their chosen items into the appropriate pieces and glue their share of the food onto the plate. (It is recommended that the plate template be printed on A3 paper to allow plenty of room to glue the foods).

Use this resource to reinforce the understanding that some items can be split into more than two equal parts and some cannot. Lead students to also discover that some shapes can be fairly shared a number of different ways, (e.g. the chocolate bar).

The strawberries can be individually cut into pieces or shared out as a collection.

Integrate this maths activity with a writing exercise. Students write about their picnic on the template provided (which includes vocabulary prompts).