Fractions are important to daily life, mathematics, and science. You might not think that little kids have any sense of what a fraction is, but well before fractions are taught in school, children develop ideas about fractions, although they are not always accurate. It’s not uncommon for a 3- or 4-year-old to ask for the “biggest half” of a cookie being cut to share with a sibling.
Even if not exactly conventional, early notions of fractions create a foundation for further exploration and knowledge-building. Understanding fractions when they are taught in school is a significant challenge for many students. Having some familiarity with fractions before formal instruction may make fractions less daunting when they are introduced in school. Parents can help lay that foundation by talking about fractional amounts in everyday conversation.
In a recent study, we asked parents to talk with their 6- to 7-year-old children about fractions for a few minutes. The most frequent examples discussed were food items that are cut into portions (e.g., “pizza”, “pie”, and “cake”). Many parents talked about how to divide these food items into parts or how to share pieces of them with other people, motivating fraction talk with a concrete example of how these numbers are useful. We also found that parent fraction talk was related to children’s fraction understanding. This was shown by child performance on a task asking them to match a symbolic fraction name with a depiction of a fractional amount (see below). For example, when asked to point to “one third”, children whose parents shared more examples of fractions in their few minutes of discussion were more likely to select the correct option (D). The ability to map fraction words onto fraction depictions is a key step to building deep understanding of fractions.
We also studied how often parents talk about fractions when interacting with 3- to 5-year-olds in the home environment. Not surprisingly, parents of young children were less likely to bring up fractions than whole numbers, but many did discuss at least one example of fractions. When they talked about fractions they mainly talked about “half”, followed by “fourth(s)” and “third(s)”.
Below we provide examples of how parents can bring up fractions in everyday activities, which can guide children toward building familiarity and understanding of fractions before they receive formal instruction in school. Some of these examples highlight opportunities to compare different fractions, which can be particularly powerful in enhancing children’s understanding of fractions (e.g., why ½ is greater than ¼, even though 4 is more than 2).
Examples of ways to talk about fractions
- When cooking or baking together, you can chat about how measuring spoons and cups represent different fractions or part of “1”. When serving food at dinner, you can talk about how you’re dividing up the food (bonus points for mentioning that fractions have equally sized portions, e.g. “There are four of us, so I am going to divide the pizza into four equal pieces; we each get one-fourth of the pizza”).
- Eating is also a great context to help your child learn to compare fractions. For example, you could ask a child in the early elementary grades (before fractions are taught), “Do you want one half or one fourth of a candy bar?” To introduce even more complexity, vary the size of the object in question – would you rather eat one fourth of a giant scoop of ice cream, or half of a mini scoop? How would you figure out which is more?
- Sharing is also a great context for fraction talk. For example, “How would you make sure this bag of candies is shared fairly between you and your friends?”
- It is easy to bring up fractions during various kinds of play. Ask your child how we will know when we are halfway done with a puzzle or what fraction of all of your stuffed animals are bears.
- Fractions frequently come up during discussions of time. For example, you might say, “We need to leave for school in 30 minutes, which is one half of an hour.” You could then ask your child how many minutes are in a whole hour.
- “Are we there yet?” This is a question that many children ask – often more than once. You might answer: “We’re one fourth of the way there. Is that more or less than halfway there?”
Children don’t necessarily get the answers to these kinds of questions right, and many adults actually struggle with fractions, too. But talking about fractions, dividing quantities into fractional amounts, and actively involving children in these discussions and activities is a fun and easy way to help young children develop a strong foundation in math. These kinds of interactions are likely to spark children’s curiosity about fractions and support their early understanding of fractions as well as their later, more formal learning about fractions in school.
