Clip 6/13: Lesson Fraction Multiplication Part 2B

ERIKA ISOMURA: I was hoping that the idea would translate into when they started working with the bar model that, "Oh, these Camila problems, I'm going to start with this amount and then I'm going to fraction it off," versus, "Oh, Jesus's problem, I'm going to draw a bunch of little parts and then count them up."



I was hoping that they'd start seeing that tie-in and start putting it into their own brains.

With one group, we ended up talking about they had found a picture that didn't match a problem and it was 1 whole, cut in half, and then it was the half, and so we did a little bit of talking and I asked them, "Whose is this like?" They were able to say, "It's Camila's." Then can we tie it back to Camila's problem? Can I just make it Camila's problem?" I talked them through it and they seem to be ... I thought they were getting, "Oh, yeah. Then, Camila, here's your 1 foot of string and I'm just going to cut it here." I thought that was interesting because I anticipated that that would be a real struggle for that particular group.



Another group was working with the rocks scenario. There was a sticky pad, so I put 8 stickies. I said, "Here's his rocks. Tell me about these rocks." They told me, "Each one is half a pound." I said, "Okay, so I'm going to grab them. How many pounds are there, Diego?” Boom, 4 pounds, because that was making sense of the problem. Both of them are very capable with numbers, which is why I think they jumped to just playing with the numbers.



Then we looked at their card which they had written 1/16 and I said, "You just told me 4 and you wrote 1/16. Which one makes sense just like the rocks?" They both were pretty immediate. "No, it's 4 pounds." Then we had a little discussion about, "Do you think when you did this originally, you were actually working with the problem or the numbers?" They both felt that, yeah, they were just working with the numbers. Then I asked them to go back and stop working with just numbers and trying to match numbers and think about how the stories work.