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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What are unit fractions?

What are unit fractions?
We explain what unit fractions are and why children need to understand the concept of unit fractions before moving onto more advanced fractions learning.

What are unit fractions?

A unit fraction is a fraction where the numerator (top number) is 1 and the denominator (bottom number) is a whole number. All these fractions are unit fractions:

Children will first learn about unit fractions in Year 1, when they will be introduced to the concept of 'half' and 'quarter'. They may be asked to divide a shape into halves or quarters as follows:

In Year 2, they will need to find one half, one quarter and three quarters of shapes and sets of objects. They will also be introduced to how these fractions are written:

When finding a fraction of a number, such as 1/4 of 12, children in Year 3 are taught that they need to divide the number 12 by the denominator (bottom number) of the fraction.  So 1/4 of 12 is 12 ÷ 4, which equals 3.

This learning then moves onto finding fractions of quantities (such as 4/5 of 20 or 2/3 of 18, etc.) so it is important that children understand the concept of unit fractions and are able to calculate with them before moving onto this more advanced learning.