6/14/10

I am starting to feel more comfortable with the multiplication and division word problems. I am nervous about dealing with fractions because I have always seemed to have issues with fractions. I am glad that Dr. Shih said a fraction is simply a partitive division problem with the numbers changed, but I am still feeling uneasy about learning fractions.

I like the way Dr. Shih presented the partitive division problem by stating, "Show how you would share 16 pieces of pizza with 4 kids." I could have actually used the information earlier that day. I have a student in my class and there was a partitive division problem that asked how many pages a student would read per day if they had 6 days to read a total of 12 pages, and they read the same number of pages each day. My poor student was completely lost. I tried to help him as much as possible. I had him draw out the number of pages and write out 1-6. With a lot of leading questions, my student finally got the answer, but I still do not really think he had it figured out. I think that if I would have presented the problem to my student in "sharing" terms, then the student would have more easily figured out the problem. I was going to try the problem with my student again today but he was not in school. I'm hoping to try the problem with him again tomorrow. I know it will be a small piece of the huge gap of information he is missing, but I guess every little bit helps!