I was so excited just walking into Jenn Guido’s room today and seeing this awesomeness on the board from the day before:

We chatted with the class a bit about their responses on the board before jumping into our Number Talk. One thing Jenn and I both noticed during this chat was the use of the word “double” when talking about equivalents such as 2/4 and 4/8. We had the chance to ask them what exactly was doubling and kept that in the back of our mind as something to keep revisiting. Even in 5th grade, I would hear the same thing being said each year. I would always have to ask, “What is doubling?” “What is 1/2 doubled?” “What exactly is doubling in the fraction?” “What happens when we double the numerator? denominator?”

After this chat, it was time to move into our planned activity. The class has been doing a lot of work with partitioning (and they used that word:) circles, rectangles and number lines so we planned a Number Talk consisting of a string of fractions for the students to compare. We were curious to hear how they talked about the fractions themselves and how they used benchmarks and equivalents. The string we developed was this:

1/6 or  1/8 – Unit Fractions

5/8 or 3/8 – Same Denominator (same-sized pieces in student terms)

3/8 or 3/4 – Common Numerator, Benchmark to 1/2, or Equivalents

3/3 or 4/3 – Benchmark to 1

The students shared their responses and did an amazing job of explaining their reasoning very clearly. In all of these problems and actually in all of their work thus far, they have always assumed the fractions referred to the same whole. We decided to change that up on them a bit and see what they would do with the statement, “1/2 is always greater than 1/3.” We thought the word “always” would make them second guess the statement, but we could not have been more wrong…they all agreed. A few students shared their responses, and it was great to see such a variety of representations.

This student was interesting because he used 12ths, and although he could not articulate why, it was labeled correctly. I am assuming it was because 1/2 and 1/3 could be placed on 12hs, but I am not sure because his reasoning sounds like he is comparing the 1/2 and 1/3 as pieces not in 12ths.

Jenn, Meghan (another 3rd grade teacher with us in the room) and I chatted while they were working about how to get them to reason about different-sized wholes. A picture would have been a dead giveaway so I just went up and circled the word always and asked, “Does this word bother anyone?” and one lone student said it made him feel like there was a twist. I love those skeptics. I asked them to talk as a table about what the twist could be in this statement, and then we had some great stuff! They talked as tables, and while only two of the tables talked about different wholes (in terms of number lines which was not what I expected either), there was so many great conversations trying to “break the statement.”

This is an example of the number line argument:

This group kept saying it would be a different answer if they were talking about “1/2 of” or “1/3 of”…then said, “Like 1/3 of 1/2” and THEN KNEW IT WAS 1/6 when I asked what that would be! They said 1/2 is 3/6 so 1/3 of that is 1/6. Wow. Then, of course I could not resist asking what 1/2 of 1/3 would be and they kept saying one half thirds, but could figure out how to write it and then questioned if that could even be right.

After having the tables share with the whole group, they all agreed the statement should be sometimes instead of always. Jenn asked them to complete two statements…

“1/2 is greater than 1/3 when….”

“1/2 is not greater than 1/3 when…”

A great day! We are doing the same thing in Meghan’s classroom tomorrow and are changing the first problem in the string to 1/2 and 1/3 so we can revisit that at the end. Can’t wait!