Flash fractions
The Flash Workshop page has examples and tutorials for teaching basic (and not so basic) maths through Flash animations. For some of these animations, the FLA files are available.
The adding fractions animation will come in handy on a projector next week. The numerators of the fractions to be added are limited to 1 or 2, but the animation does get across the idea of finding the highest common factor of the denominators and re-writing both fractions over this denominator.
Many students find moving between ‘mixed’ and ‘improper’ (top heavy) fractions hard. Another animation illustrates the transition between mixed and top heavy very well.
I have uploaded the SWF files to bodmas so that I can link to them directly and have a larger scale animation for projecting. The originals have had a small screen size set in the HTML file, and this small size will not be clear on a projected screen.