Fractions Freebie!

I am gearing up to teach a unit on fractions.  In the state of Oregon, students don't learn fractions until 3rd grade.  I am thankful that Common Core will start them earlier, because they can be a hard concept to grasp!

I started out my unit by using Lindsey The Teacher Wife's Fraction Fun unit last week.  We did her sort and made the little books.  I also loved the posters to add to my math wall as the students learned the vocabulary words denominator and numerator.

My district uses the math curriculum Bridges in Mathematics from The Math Learning Center.  Bridges has some great lessons, but they needed to be supplemented with some paper pencil practice (gotta pass that state test!).  You can find ALL of the Bridges supplemental practice pages for free on their website:

• Kindergarten
• 1st grade
• 2nd grade
• 3rd grade
• 4th grade
• 5th grade

These are wonderful ways for my students to practice skills as morning work, or for students who are struggling with the concepts.  Spanish versions are also available.

Another curriculum my district uses for grades 3-5 is Digging into Mathematics.  This is a series of three workbooks per grade level that are based on NCTM's focal points (the way Oregon's math standards are organized, too).  In each workbook, there are lesson overviews, vocabulary words, learning targets, practice pages, and a skill check.  I plan to use Digging into Math as the intro to each standard, then teach a corresponding Bridges lesson, then follow up with the Digging into math skill check.  The skill checks are short - only 5 questions, so they do not take long to grade.  If I stay on top of the grading (crossing my fingers!!!), I should be able to pull students who did not do well on the skill check each morning and do some re-teaching with the Bridges practice pages and other worksheets from the web.  

I plan to do two extra lessons that are not included in our curriculum: one to teach greater than/ less than (that I will tell you about next week) and one to teach parts of a whole.  Remember this book the Hershey Fractions Book that I got from Goodwillbooks.com?  

I made a worksheet with a Hershey's bar on it for the students to manipulate and move around as I read the book.  Just copy a half class set on brown construction paper and cut in half.  Using real Hershey's bars would be better, but when you have 31 kids in your class, that kind of stuff adds up quickly!

Here is the worksheet on Google Docs for you to use:

How do you teach fractions?  Do you know of any great websites that teach to your state standards or the Common Core for math?