Fractions at Home

My daughter, Sydney, cries when she gets math homework, much to my consternation, since I am a math teacher! Unfortunately, she does have homework every night, and a good amount of it is math. Recently, she has been learning about fractions and has proclaimed that she hates them, math, and her teacher.

So, how do we begin at home to overcome this aversion to fractions, the association of fractions to math, and ultimately to her teacher and school? The answer is amazingly simple for a teacher, but not so much for a parent (we will not discuss in detail here my two personas, but l will admit that once the teacher comes in the door of her home, she becomes the parent!). As I was preparing Syd’s Saturday breakfast of pancakes (the frozen pop-in-the-toaster kind; neither the teacher nor the parent is a very good cook.), I cut them into eight pieces, resembling a pizza. They were in a stack of two (I burnt the third one), in 16 total pieces. I brought them to Syd.

“Hey,” Syd said, “they are in fractions!” Really, I am not making that up, she actually made the association I was attempting to get her to make. So, I began asking questions:

1. How many pieces are the pancakes cut into? (Syd said “eight” at first, and then corrected after to “sixteen” after we discussed that there were two.
2. What fraction of the pancakes did Mommy burn? (“one-third” but that took some  work to elicit—getting her to understand that the “twenty-fourths” that the pancakes would have been cut into was a stretch, and I did not attempt the “one-third equals eight-twenty-fourths connection, but that could be a future lesson). Conversely, what fraction was still edible? (“two-thirds”)
3. How much of the pancakes have you eaten? (When she ate four pieces, she figured “four-sixteenths” and after much prompting, we were able to arrive at “two-eighths” and “one-fourth” and make the connection that they were all the same amount.)
4. How many pancake pieces are left? (Syd ate 11 pieces, so she told me “five-sixteenths”, and her brother supplied the eleven-sixteenths answer that Syd ate)

The result of this fraction inquisition was that the next day, Sydney again wanted pancakes, and this time she wanted more, not to eat, but to make more fraction connections! I cannot wait to use waffles and blueberries as coordinates on a grid!

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