Our Homemade Fraction Manipulatives

I decided that it would be better to stick with fraction bars instead of trying to make my own pie piece fractions since the odds of my dividing a circle equally into thirds, sixths, and ninths would be slim to none. The brown strip which represents one whole is made of construction paper since that is the only kind of paper in my house that is twelve inches long. All of the fraction pieces are made of the same cardstock we use for our lapbooks.

The concept that we need to work on is basically equivalent fractions. We'll lay out the bars to show how 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8, etc. and 1/3, 2/6, 3/9 etc. are simply different ways of naming the same amount. Then to explain why multiplying the top and bottom of the fraction by the same number doesn't change the amount, we'll discuss that multiplying by 2/2 is the same as multiplying by 1. Hopefully with something concrete to look at, the last couple of exercises in the workbook will be much easier. Depending on how it goes we can either move straight into the exercises in the IP or spend a couple of days working exercises of our own. Worst case scenario, we can always move on for now and spend some more time on fractions over the summer.