Math does not have to be difficult. Check out the magic below:

I have seen many students have trouble with fractions. Fractions are parts of a whole.

Slices of a pizza can be parts of a whole.

Puzzle pieces are parts of a whole.

A value meal at McDonalds is a set that contains parts. You can treat the value meal as a whole.

What do you usually get in a value meal? A sandwich, fries, and a drink.

There are three parts to this meal. If you just look at the sandwich, that is 1/3 of your meal.

The 1 represents how much you actually have from the total. The 3 represents the total amount of parts you have.

A sandwich is one part of your 3-part meal.

The whole meal is 3/3, meaning that you have three parts out of three. This is another way of representing a whole.

3/3 = 1

This checks out mathematically. If you divided 3 by 3, the answer you get is 1. The number 3 would go into itself 1 time.

What else can be represented in fractions?

I got it! Let us say it is your birthday. You get a nice cake your birthday. It is your favorite. You have 10 people at your birthday party. There need to be 11 slices of cake available. There are 10 for your guests and 1 slice for you. You can't leave yourself out of the celebration, now can you? If three people receive cake right now, how is that expressed as a fraction?

3/11

There are 3 pieces of cake out of 11 pieces that have been served.

How many have not been served?

11/11 - 3/11 = 8/11

8 pieces out of 11 have not been served.

Oh by the way, do you know how to subtract fractions? We just did that. Yeah, we did. We can add fractions too:

8/11 + 3/11 = 11/11 (also known as 1)

A fraction has two numbers:

The numerator

The denominator

The numerator is the top number, and the denominator is the bottom number.

When the denominators are similar, just add or subtract the top number.

1/4 + 2/4 = 3/4

5/8 - 2/8 = 3/8

What happens when the denominators are different?

1/4 + 1/2 = ?

You have to make the denominators match. I am going to save that skill for the next lesson.

Want to practice with fractions RIGHT NOW? Don't want to wait for me?

You can check out Khan Academy and Purple Math:

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/fraction-arithmetic

https://www.purplemath.com/modules/fraction4.htm