fbpx

Category: Fractions and Decimals

Which is the BEST Hands-On Tool for Teaching Decimals?

  5th-grade teachers are set with a difficult task. Your students previously spent the majority of their time working with whole numbers in the base ten system. Now, you are supporting your students to build numbers that may be very difficult to model and conceptualize. Thinking CRA is helpful but what

Read More »

Line Plot Lessons that Work!

When you think of teaching graphing, hands-on might not be the first idea that comes to mind. You can teach line plots with or without fractions by using hands-on material to boost meaning and understanding for all of your learners. These ideas for line plot lessons will help all of

Read More »

Fraction Vocabulary: It’s Critical!

Naming fractions comes so naturally to some of our learners but to others, especially our kids with speech and language needs, naming fractions can be really difficult! One reason why this is such a difficult skill to teach or to learn for some of our kids is that not only

Read More »

Multiplying Fractions by a Whole Number

Fraction concepts are taken up a level in 5th grade and many of the topics are very abstract and difficult for students to understand. Multiplying fractions by a whole number doesn’t need to be one of these difficult concepts! By using the CRA (Concrete-Representative-Abstract) framework your students will link what

Read More »

Teaching Fractions on a Number Line

For primary students, it is important for students to not only know how to count from 1-10 but to also understand the count sequence. I have written on this in the past and suggested number path activities for our youngest students. Once our students enter 3rd grade and begin to

Read More »

Adding Fractions with Unlike Denominators

How do you add fractions with unlike denominators? Find common denominators of course! You know, however, that I’m a big proponent of students understanding why they are using a strategy. If our students don’t know why they are using a strategy so many of our learners don’t know when to

Read More »

How to Teach Rounding Decimal Numbers

A few years back I wrote the post “5 And Above, Give It a Shove… No, Really…”  It’s been a few years but when I type “rounding” into Pinterest, 3 of the top 5 results still involve a search for an anchor chart. Anchor charts are great, but when your students

Read More »

Why Teaching Line Plots is Harder Than it Looks

Much of the “data and graphing” instruction comes quite easily to students. A bar graph or pictograph is really quite intuitive to read- the difficulty in instruction comes in when students are asked to solve comparison word problems based on the data in the charts. And we KNOW that comparison

Read More »

The Math Spot Compares Fractions: Abstract Thinking

We’ve made it! We’re at the last post in the 4 part fraction comparison series. If you haven’t read parts 1, 2, and 3, go back and begin there. Up until this point we have focused on teaching fraction comparisons by allowing students to have experiences that would promote understanding

Read More »