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Returning to manipulatives to ground fraction concepts.
I am new to the 6th grade math classroom. Student work on multiplying/dividing fractions shows, as no surprise, familiarity to math procedures. Also of no surprise is their almost total understanding of what the concepts involved. Word problems are a disaster not only because the students have difficulty figuring out exactly what the question is asking, but also because they don’t have even a basic grasp of what is going on. So, I brought in visual…number lines and fraction blocks. The students acted like they had never seen them before. It is too early to tell if this has or will make a difference, but my sense is that the visual presentation of fraction operations may help all my students with their depth of knowledge.