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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.
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2 Replies
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Great ideas @sean-breen ! I’m sure that those visual representations WILL make a difference. Keep us updated!
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Something that really helped my students is when I had THEM make up word problems that necessitated dividing fractions. Once they had their word problem created, they recorded it on Flipgrid, and then we tackled one each day. Often, listening to their OWN question… the same student realized it wasn’t a division question. Making their own problems really helped a lot and they loved listening to questions created by their peers. (My students didn’t like showing their faces, so I allowed them to put stickers over their face on the Flipgrid interface.)
