Teaching fractions can be a breeze

Whenever the parents of graduating fifth graders asks us how their kids can better prepare for middle school over the summer vacation, our advice varies depending on the student, but one item is always in the list – Fractions.

A solid foundation in the understanding of fractions is fundamental in learning extension topics such as rates and proportion, percent and decimals. It is so important that we consider it the final of three pillars in elementary mathematics education.

Yet, by the time, students finished elementary school, many still do not have a firm grasp of concepts such as comparing fractions using the same whole, converting between mixed numbers and improper fractions, not to mention basic operations on fractions – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing – like and unlike fractions.

Learning fractions is not as difficult as it seems, if we do it one step at a time, starting with the simplest example of what a fractional value represents, and we can start introducing these intuition as early as 2nd grade.

In this section, we collect some of the resources that deals with fractions. It is our hope that teachers and parents would benefit from these articles, worksheets, and video resources and feel more comfortable teaching this very important and interesting topic!