Cheerful Classroom Podcast: Recent Episodes
Melissa Martinez
Melissa strives to help upper elementary teachers stop worrying about what to teach tomorrow and start planning engaging lessons to be able to do what they love outside of teaching.
When we teach students to make common denominators can get very tiresome quickly. All of the little opportunities for errors with making equivalent fractions, adding and subtracting, and just when they think they are done they have to simplify the fraction. It can definitely get tedious quickly. One area that I have gotten close to perfecting is teaching my students to make common denominators.
Curriculum Mapping is the process of determining what you’re going to teach and in what order you’re going to teach it. This is a crucial part of being able to stop worrying about what to teach tomorrow and start lesson planning more efficiently. Interested in joining the free 5 Day Challenge to Map Your First Month? Sign Up here: https://thatonecheerfulclassroom.mykajabi.com/challenge-opt-in
Teaching fractions are very important, yet very poorly understood, even by many adults. If adults don’t understand them, that means our students are in worse shape. Unfortunately, students are often applying whole number practices to fractions and few teachers are correcting this (more on this in a minute). Furthermore, most teachers are teaching more about the procedures rather than the actual meaning of fractions or “fraction sense.” To help “correct” these and break these areas of confusion, I bring to you the best practices or the 10 ways for students to master fractions.