I wrote this story starter for my 5th grade class a couple of years ago.
All fractions have two basic parts called the numerator and
the denominator. The denominator tells
us how many parts are in the WHOLE and the numerator tells how many of those
parts are being thought about or spoken about.
One thing fractions have in common with whole numbers is the fact that
they can be added to and subtracted from each other.
For example,
let’s say Rachel, Morgan and Kasey went out to lunch at a pizzeria that sells
pizza by the slice and this is what they ordered:
Rachel ordered
1 slice.
Morgan
ordered 3 slices.
Kasey
ordered 2 slices.
When the
food arrived at their table Kasey said, “Wow!
That’s a lot of food. I’ll bet if
we put all our slices together it would make a whole pizza.”
Then Rachel
said, “I’m too hungry to play with our lunch but there’s another way we can
figure this out. “Excuse me Miss,” Rachel said to the waitress. “How many slices are there in a whole pizza?”
“Eight,” the
waitress replied.
“I get it.
That means each slice is 1/8 of a whole pizza,” said Morgan.
“Right,”
said Kasey as she took a clean napkin to write on. “Rachel’s one slice equals 1/8, Morgan’s
three slices equals 3/8 and my two slices equals 2/8. Now we just add them up.”
The waitress
was clearing a nearby table and she overheard the girls’ conversation. She looked up and said, “I’m great at math
and I know the answer. It’s 6/24.”
The girls
didn’t want to hurt the waitress’s feelings but they knew she had made a
mistake.
Continue
the story by telling how the girls responded to the waitress. In addition to your math knowledge, please
demonstrate your ability to format and punctuate dialogue.
