Interactive Foldables for Fractions and Modeling Division {Mid-Week Motivation}

I was up to my ears this month in teaching fractions. Do you love or hate teaching this unit? I seem to have a love/hate relationship with it. There are days when teaching the concepts is awesome. It's like we are being served hot chocolate on the Polar Express... people are singing and dancing and just genuinely happy. Then there are days when I feel like I'm sitting in the dentist chair waiting to get my teeth drilled.....Today I want to share a few activities that I've created and used, and I hope they can make teaching fractions a little easier for you.

One of the first things that I teach is vocabulary. It is so important that my students are speaking math correctly every day. Speaking the language helps us to write the language, and this is important when it comes to assessments. I use a foldable to keep the vocabulary all in one place.

To reinforce the knowledge and vocabulary I have my students use these memory cards to play concentration. They love to spend a little time in small groups together, and speaking math is a perfect way to spend time with friends.

I also like to use foldables to teach my students the steps to adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions. To me it is more important to practice the steps, then to spend time writing out all the steps. We put the foldables into our notebooks, and then leave them open while we practice using our dry erase boards.

And yes, I do teach them the modeling of multiplying and dividing fractions. I also spend time working through dividing fractions with common denominators as well as the multiplicative inverse of Keep-Change-Flip.

When we start the our drawing models section, I tell the story of my father and baking loaves of bread. Basically the idea that his recipe makes a certain number of loaves and I have to divide up the loaves. Here is an example:

The idea of telling a story as we work through these problems really helps them make real world connections to the story. One of the great things about completing the models first was I could use them to lead my students into developing their own concept for division. This was really amazing this year. In just a few examples several figured out you could use a common denominator and make equivalent fractions, then divide the numerators and then the denominators to find the answer. My students really caught on to this concept! I love giving them multiple ways to solve problems, and many do a great job using math vocabulary for explanations with this type of problem solving. I'm curious for teachers of fraction division--- do you teach your students to find a common denominator to divide? Many of mine found it easier than the short cut this year.

I would love to hear how you incorporate vocabulary, or model drawing into your fraction lessons!
Leave a comment below and let me know!
If you need foldables for your classroom- check out my Fractions in Actions Bundle: It includes Interactive Foldables for basic vocabulary, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; vocabulary matching cards for center work, and an interactive game you can use with any operation.
It is on sale right now on TpT for WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY if you are interested.