Article 2 "How did the answer get bigger?"

             For this particular blog, I will be discussing an article from the journal Mathematics teaching in the Middle School. The name of the article is "How did the answer get bigger?" This article addresses the fact that when students begin to work with dividing fractions, they tend to have trouble comprehending the idea that the answer could be bigger than the dividend or divisor. So a big point of this article is that number sense includes your students understanding the significance of the size of the fraction. Another big point is that your students need to understand the connections between the whole and an individual fraction and between other fractions.This article also talks about how your students need to have a flexible mind to understand certain concepts involving fractions.
              This particular article is important for fifth to sixth grade because those are the academic years when students start getting into dividing fractions. This is important because up till these academic years, students are only use to doing whole number dividing, which is why it makes it difficult for the students to understand the concept of how an answer got bigger. You can certainly implement this in the classroom by using several of the strategies mentioned in the article. Most of them include the use of manipulatives. I have noticed the more I research different topics and articles in math that hands on and the use of manipulatives are very popular strategies. So, to implement this in your classroom, according to the article, please remember to look at multiplying and dividing fractions from the areas of modeling, equivalence, and symbolism. An example would be to use individual cubes to show the division in a visual sense so the students have the opportunity to physically see how it turns into a big answer.