Making Fractions Fun!

Many students struggle to grasp the concept of fractions because they are such an abstract concept. Mentally visualizing part-to-whole relationships can be a challenging skill to acquire. Hands-on teaching strategies help make this abstract concept more concrete and tangible. The following visuals and manipulatives can help you work on developing your child’s number sense when it comes to fractions:

1. Use Legos to visualize fraction concepts:

This visual can help break down the concept of adding and multiplying together fractions. Build something together as you learn! Once you have both constructed your building, try to guess whose is bigger. What fraction of the larger one do you think the smaller one is? Count your Legos up to find out.

2. Cooking: Use cooking or baking as a fun (and tasty) tool to help familiarize your child with real-world use of fractions. If the recipe calls for a cup of flour, show them how ¼ cup fits into 1 cup 4 times. See if they can figure out how many ¼ cups would fit into a ½ cup. How many ½ cups will fit into 2 cups? Quiz them like this as you prepare the recipe. Come up with some real-world applications by making 1-2 dozen cupcakes or cookies. If you made a dozen cupcakes and want to bring half of them to your class, how many cupcakes are left for you? What if you want to bring a quarter of what’s left to grandma? What fraction of the original 12 is that? And so on. Making pizza together is another fun way to practice fractions using the pizza slices. This can be a particularly useful tool if your child is learning to use pie charts in school 

3. Puzzles: Put together a puzzle with pieces that are all roughly the same size. Then try and guess what fraction of the puzzle each of the individual elements is. For example, in a 200-piece puzzle like the one below, what fraction of the pieces are used to make up the panda? The toucan? The lemur?

4. Play “Fraction War”: The rules of “War” are simple: each player draws a card, and the player who draws the higher card wins. Jacks are 11, Queens are 12, Kings are 13, and Aces are 1. To play “Fraction War”, place a pencil horizontally in front of each player. Each player draws 2 cards, one as the numerator over the pencil, and one as the denominator under the pencil. The player with the largest fraction wins!

5. Ordering fractions with dominoes: Have your child turn over five dominoes. The top number is the numerator and the bottom is the denominator. Have them order the fractions from smallest to largest. Make it into a game by racing each other! You can also challenge them to find the difference between the biggest fraction and the smallest fraction. The person with the biggest difference wins!