I believe that manipulatives can be very helpful to students when they are learning proportions and fractions. This is because they can visualize a part of something when they can see it in front of them. Seeing 4 of 10 pieces slices is tangible and makes it more sense to many students. the part that I need help with, and many students need help with is the transferring from visual aids to mental math. Students have trouble making this jump. Does anyone else have ideas as to how we can help our students with this problem?
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Week 9 Post
The first thing that stood out to me in the Wearne and Kouba article was that they admit something that everyone knows is very true, that students have lots of trouble with fractions and proportions in general. At the same time we also know that these tools are very much so needed for students as they progress through both school and life. I found the sample question of "How many fourths make a whole?" to be interesting for many reasons. One is that the only 50% of fourth graders answered the question correctly and 16% omitted the questions all together. The fact that almost 1/5 of the students omitted the question is scary to me because that means that they did not even know where to begin to find the answer, let alone what it actually was. When in actuality the answer was right in front of them! I hope that my students will test better than all of the sample results that we see, because the results are not where I want out youth to be mathematically.
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Jenna, I feel that you hit on some very important goals that the article presented. I feel that your comment about how almost 20% of the fourth graders omitted the question is a very very scary thing. I know in my first grade class that we have been introducing fractions very slowly and with objects instead of just looking at numbers. If by the fourth grade fractions haven't really become an operation to the students, I feel that it's really going to effect the ways in which learning will take place as they move throughout their learning. Making things tangible for students to see is a more realistic way to get a solid grasp at an early age. If the same question to "How many fourths make a whole" was given again and students realized that a whole was a pizza and then put into fourths, I feel that it would maybe get better results. When it comes to fractions, I feel that many younger students don't realize that the denominator basically gives the answer to how many pieces are needed for a whole. I know that you're in a third grade class and I wonder if your students would be able to answer that question? I have a feeling that if the question was given with a picture then maybe some of my first graders would be able to get that question correct.
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