Students often struggle to understand math concepts related to fractions, including simplifying fractions, equivalent fractions, comparing fractions, and adding and subtracting fractions.
While memorizing procedures and working through practice problems can be helpful, they often fail to help students gain a true conceptual understanding of fractions.
Without a deep conceptual understanding of a topic like fractions, students are likely to struggle with the topic indefinitely.
However, there are many effective hands-on activities that allow students to visually explore fractions and develop a deep conceptual understanding that they will be able to apply to more challenging topics related to fractions.
And, arguably the best hands-on activity for exploring fractions is the use of Fraction Strips.
In this guide, you will learn how to use fraction strips in your classroom with three different options:
A fraction strip is a rectangular sheet of colored paper that represents a fraction. Fraction strips are meant to be used in comparison with each other so that students can see the relationship between fractions and fractional parts. Fraction strips can various lengths depending on the color that they represent and they typically use a range of colors to further illustrate the difference between different fractions and how they compare/contrast with each other.
For example, the image below shows an example of using fraction strips to explore a relationship between equivalent fractions, namely that 4/8, 2/4, and 1/2 are all equivalent fractions that can be simplified to one half.
