Pre-skills to Learning Fractions
Oftentimes parents and teachers will notice a student is struggling in a particular area of math, but they miss the opportunity to look deeper to see WHY the student might be struggling. When this happens, the methods they use to teach this student often fall flat.
For example, the student may be struggling with fractions, so the teachers tries programs and learning tools aimed at teaching fractions in a way the student will understand.
The problem is, if you look a little bit deeper, you'll probably find that the student hasn't grasped another concept that is a building block to understanding fractions.
This happened to our family. My daughter was in sixth grade and her class was working on fractions. I bought a dyscalculia ebook on fractions by Ronit Bird. As I looked at the beginning of the book, it said that the student needs to have a grasped a foundational sense of division and multiplication. I thought, “Yeah, that’s not my kid.” So I looked back at Ronit Bird’s previous ebook on multiplication and division, and found the same thing.
In order to understand multiplication and division, there were some concepts that my daughter needed to understand before starting with that ebook. Not yet understanding these concepts kept her from really understanding multiplication and division, which also kept her from understanding fractions. (You can see how we're going all the way back here).
Some of those concepts were: “Doubling," taking a number and adding two of them together. She didn't know how to "halve," take a number and equally divide it into two halves. She did not know all of her components of numbers, so she didn't know all the ways to build a number, or that numbers were inside of other numbers, or made of other numbers. She didn't know how to "bridge," a number line or Cuisenaire rod technique dyscalculics can use to subtract and add. She didn't know how "compose" and "decompose" a number, also known as "partition" or "recombine" a number. And she also didn't really understand place value.
These are some concepts that are building blocks for multiplication and division, which are building blocks for fractions. In order to help her with fractions, we needed to go all the way back to some of these previous concepts and help her grasp those first.
If we want success for our students, it’s absolutely necessary to go all the way back to find the core issue that's impacting a student’s understanding of the concept we want them to learn. If we don’t, we will likely be spinning our wheels, wasting time, and causing a lot of stress and frustration for our students. It’s worth taking a step back, so that greater steps forward are possible.