Fraction Action!

 Students are knee-deep with fractions. When you say Fractions, even many adults admit that they "hate" fractions. Yet, teaching fractions has provided some of my most joyful teaching days in math!

A wonderful Colleague introduced me to this post by Graham Fletcher:

Below, you can see how students talked through the points on the number line.

I was pretty impressed. You can see that my first "B" was not really centered at the 1/2 mark (really the second one is not great either!) and students originally noted 3/8. When the student explained why it was 3/8 vs. 4/8, I knew that I needed to redraw my 1/2 mark for the rest of the conversation to move forward.

The number line was presented in purple. The annotation in pink marker shows the kids' thinking.

This string was fun! Students recognized the pattern of the half from the previous string becoming the endpoint for the next string. In other words, we kept narrowing in on the values between the half and the whole.

We have also started many lessons by thinking about how we can label fractional parts and how they are equivalent to other parts.

I highly encourage you to try these with your students as they were informative and built conceptual knowledge along the way!

Students shared their ideas:

Here is another example where students 

shared their thinking:

Original:

I loved the green outline of the quadrilateral that was 3/8. I did not see that one!