Episode of the week: Cats and Mice (Add fractions)
Purpose of this episode
Expand the understanding of addition as “putting together” to fractions, and see how fractions are built up from unit fractions. Use this insight into unit fractions as building blocks to successfully add fractions with the same denominator.
Description
Mice are stealing the cheese! In this episode, the child helps the mice calculate how much of each type of cheese they have. The cheeses are displayed visually, as sectors of a disc, and the child is encouraged to move the parts
from one container to another to create a visual that helps them to see the total.
Watch Video Walkthrough
Consonance with Our Pedagogical Principles
What makes it great?
If you can count, you can add–even fractions!
Connecting with children’s prior understanding, here, addition of fractions is an expansion of the addition operation learned with whole numbers. The concrete and interactive model invites users to learn by doing - building with unit fractions - and the wrong answer feedback effectively takes advantage of this, giving the child the option to count unit fractions in order to solve the addition problem.
Multiple representations of the correct answer are accepted as correct
In fact, the concrete visual model as well as the correct answer feedback reinforce conceptual understanding of the various different ways that the correct answer can be represented. The child can follow their own intuition when deciding which one to use.
The last question happens in the dark!
We take advantage of this story that appeals to children to remove the concrete model and move to abstraction in the last question. The comic story and the child’s role in the caper, help to reduce anxiety and set the right mood for learning.