Understanding The Concept Of 1 Unit Fractions

The first lesson focuses on student engagement and application by shading figures into fractions. It moves beyond solely identifying unit fractions, which has been our focus over the past week leading up to this lesson segment, and pushes students to be able to understand the concept of 1 unit fraction, for example, ¼, can be expanded to 2/4 or ¾ based on how a particular shape is partitioned. As a way of reinforcing the concept of some fractions being greater than unit fractions, in the second lesson students focus on applying their knowledge to represent those fractions with number bonds. Our students have used number bonds extensively over the past semester as a way to demonstrate multiplication and division facts. Number bonds will connect

In the first application problem, it reads, “Robert took half of the slime in a container. He split the remaining slime equally into 2 bowls for his mother and sister. Robert said, ‘I used 1 half, and each of you gets 1 half.’ Is Robert right? Answer the question and explain your thinking using your pictures and words.” This question will force some students to really ask themselves, “Does this make sense?” This involves foundational word problem solving skill that we have been pushing toward from the beginning of the year. Talking through a strategy is a crucial part of problem solving and being able to articulate why, for example, there cannot be three halves in one whole based on a diagram, will be a strong step to take at the onset of our first lesson. Moving forward, students will have the opportunity to engage in a hands on activity in order to further their problem solving skills. We will have had some experience identifying different parts of a whole on extremely straight and clear rectangles produced by the teacher, but in this lesson students will have the chance to examine some different rectangles produced by

They will have to use their problem solving skills to delve into unfamiliar fractions such as 7/12, 4/9, or anything else that our students can come up with. Students will need to apply their knowledge in order to identify, for example, 4/9 and then dig deeper to realize that 5/9 is left over. This problem solving will feed into number bonds when there is a number bond such as 4/4 partitioned into ¼ and then students will have to find the other missing part. This is simply another avenue to explore adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators and this will be a very important foundation as we continue to proceed in fractions moving forward in the year. In the final lesson regarding fractions with larger numerators than denominators, student problem solving will begin to crescendo with the problem with 5 half slices of bread. We will demonstrate this as a number bond with 5/4 in the top slot. However students will have to use discourse in order to reach this conclusion and then students can divide that number bond in multiple ways that will add up to