Fractions are the bane of every middle school and high school teacher’s existence, I think. Adrienne Stuckey of Education Adaptations writes that a lot of the students she works with are at a disadvantage because they don’t know their multiplication facts well enough to make factoring easy. (You notice this problem when students are learning to factor polynomials too).
Students learn how to manipulate fractions in 6th grade in this area usually, but by oh, say, 7th or 8th grade, they seem to have magically forgotten everything they ever knew. There are lots of good ways of using manipulatives and diagrams, and things when you first teach fractions, but you want something different when you know you’re teaching it for the second or third or fourth time. Ms Cookie at Ms Cookie at Math Teacher Mambo came up with a fraction song for her students (scroll down to the post titled Fraction Song). It won’t solve the factoring problem, but if you learn it in December you can go caroling to the other math classes ; )
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