I have always been nervous about getting to fractions. Not that I don't get them myself; most math makes sense pretty darn quickly to me. However, I just wasn't sure how I could explain lowest common denominators and equivalent fractions to a 7-year-old. I mean, those are some complicated words for such a young child. To my chagrin, I found an app that allowed me to easily manipulate pies in order to show her how 1/3 is the same as 2/6. In addition, I used Cheerios. Yes, the same things you might have used to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. After all, fractions are not just parts of a whole item, they are also parts of a whole group. I split 10 cheerios (my ONE GROUP) into 5 groups of 2 and pretended to eat 1/5 of them (1 of the 5 groups). Then I split them up into 10 groups of 1 and pretended to eat 2/10 of them (2 of the 10 groups). In this way, I showed her that I still ate the same amount. After that, applying division and multiplication in order to determine equivalency was a breeze! Now we just need to work on identifying fractions such as 2/6 and 3/9 as equivalent. My plan is to teach her to just muliply the denominators, then use the equivalency rule of "whatever you do to the bottom, you must do to the top" to check the numerators. Seems like the simplest way since she's only 7. Eventually, she'll come up with her own quick, all-in-her-head method.
Here is what I used to teach this lesson:
* iTunes App: Teaching Table
* Cheerios
Here is what we use for practice:
* Virtual Spaces iTunes App: Smart Pirate Fractions
* Singapore Math 3B Workbook
