Stephen H. stated:
One can't expect a kid to only recognise a pizza cut into 10 pieces to make sense of the words that describe what that looks like.
to which I responded:
Why not?
Then Stephen replied (to my rhetorical question) with:
Because you might not want to cut a pizza into 10 pieces?
That's not relevant, Stephen. Your original question was about whether a kid could RECOGNIZE a pizza cut into 10 pieces. It had nothing to do with whether one would actually want to cut it into 10 pieces.
I think a child could understand the concept of dividing a pizza (or anything else) into any number of parts, including ten. If one wanted to cut one (hypothetically and figuratively) into 10 parts to assist a child's learning the concept of the number 0.1 then I see no problem with that.
Thus decimals can be taught without using common fractions and therefore adopting metric (which is decimal) virtually eliminates the need to teach common fractions at all.
Regards, Bill Hooper Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Go Metric America! Or get left behind! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
