Mastery of skills, fractions!!!… If you conduct a survey to find out the most common topics that students don’t understand, ergo don’t like. I would put a wager on fractions cropping up. That’s why I love teaching fractions. Helping students understand this topics, has become an obsession.
Im told and I’m paraphrasing…
It’s not the actual concept of a fraction that is difficult – it is the operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, comparing, simplifying, etc. of fractions. The rules are easy enough to learn, it’s just remembering what to do and when to do it”
No matter how many times we practise not adding the denominators and not adding the numerators students still add the numerator and the denominator. Students know that they definitely do not add the denominator and the numerator but they still do it! In the past two years I’ve gone from my cart man method to the kiss method!
Students understand it perfectly, they even remember the comment in their books that they should practise their kissing. Even a classroom quote. So until examinations are going to come with a hint page which indicates that adding and subtracting fractions uses the kiss method I’m lost. I’m working on it.
ktlmaths 