Fraction - fun or fright

For the past two weeks we have been playing with fractions.  Fractions can be a lot of fun when you get to play with materials and you feel you master them. For some fractions may look frightening. Fraction concept is probably one of the hardest ones to truly understand. Even though children see pizzas and cookies shared, and are able to find a half or a quarter of a rectangle already in reception, the full understanding of part-whole-relationship idea, and what the numbers in written form of a fraction mean, may stay hazy for years. I am a firm believer in strong foundations, therefore I'd rather spend longer time building the conceptual understanding than quickly introducing new terms and galloping through curriculum. We use lots of hands-on materials in class instead of memorizing procedures and formulas. One of the assessments showed that the pie model is the easiest to understand. The set model is the hardest. This week we spent time finding fractions of a line and a set and finding the whole when only a fraction was given.

The two important ideas to understand:
A whole can be shared in fair shares - that is the fractional part and can be named.
The parts can be counted.
 
For example:

This is a whole. It has six fair shares. We can call them sixths. We can count the sixths.

This is one sixth

This is four sixths

This is ten sixths

Or

This is a whole. It has four fair shares. We can call them fourths or quarters. We can count the fourths.

This is one fourth.

This is three fourths

This is ten fourths

Making it even trickier is to figure out the whole when fractional parts are shown.


For example:

If this is four sixths then...

..... this fractional part is a sixth and ....

...we need six sixths to make the whole

or

If this is four thirds then....

...the fractional part is called a third and...

.... we need three thirds to make the whole

It is always easier to find a fraction when the whole is known. Only when the concept of fraction is firmly in place is it possible to find the whole when the fraction is given.






As I said earlier, the more practice there is with models the stronger the concept becomes.