This week I had the chance to help my youngest son with multiplying fractions. He was having a really frustrating time with it and was almost in tears. The first time I showed him what to do he got very upset because it was not how he had been shown in class. "it just doesn't make any sense!" he yelled. At that point, we took a break. We walked down to the store bought some milk and talked about non-math topics. By the time we got back home, he was feeling much calmer and ready to try again.
It turns out that one major source of his frustration was the mix of whole numbers and fractions. Here's an example of one of his equations:

2 1/3 x 4 1/8

What helped him understand what was going on was to visualize that the 2 and 4 were both fractions and add them together

3/3+3/3 = 6/3

6/3+ 1/3= 7/3

8/8+8/8+8/8+8/8=32/8

32/8+1/8=33/8

Then we took and multiplied those numbers

7/3 x 33/8 =231/24

After multiplying we had a lot of simplifying to do! We figured out how many times 24 would go into 231. Markian thought it would be a good idea to start by adding 24+24=48. Then we added 48+48=96. My son got excited and said- look! we're almost there! So we continued to add 24's till we went over 231. We were able to add 24 into 231 9 times before going over and had 15 left over.
9 15/24....well it looked like we had another fraction to simplify! this one was easier, both numbers are divisible by 3 and can be simplified to 5/8, so our answer was 9 5/8.  Phew!

This poster was really helpful, so was taking the time to take a step back and look at what a whole meant and how it applied when multiplying fractions.

Math Joke of the week:

Q: What does the zero say to the eight?
A: Nice belt.