Several weeks ago my class was trying to discover why we need to have a common denominator when adding or subtracting fractions. I gave them fraction tiles and different practice problems and encouraged them to explain why some were easy and some were difficult. During this process, the students made a great discovery: the denominator’s job is to tell us the size of the piece we are working with, and the numerator tells us how many of those pieces we have. If your student struggles to understand fractions, I encourage you to go back to this basic anatomy of a fraction and then to build fractions using the fraction tiles we have available to borrow in the Project Read office. As always, send me an
