Telling The Truth About Adding Fractions
Good Morning! When I ask my students how they feel about fractions, I don't really need to listen to what they say. I just need to pay attention to their faces. They're generally not fans. When I ask them why they don't like fractions, the responses are not very diverse; they hated adding and subtracting fractions and they hated having to find the lowest common denominator. And I get it. If the fractions have a common denominator, you can just add the numerators. But if they do not have a common denominator, you have to find one first and then rewrite the original fractions as new, equivalent fractions with the new, common denominator. Perhaps you may remember your teacher saying something along the lines of, "You need to find the lowest common denominator first. If you can't find it you can multiply the two denominators." We will come back to that statement later. First, I want to discuss the topics of Greatest Common Factor (GCF) and Lowest Common Multiple (