🍕 Fractions: Equal Parts

You are going to share a pizza with your friends. Everyone should get slices of the same size! Let’s discover fractions.

This is a whole pizza. Let’s cut it down the middle into two equal parts. Each part is one half of the pizza: 1/2.

If we cut the pizza into 3 equal parts, each slice is 1/3: one third. If we cut it into 4 equal parts, each slice is 1/4: one quarter.

Fractions are not only for pizza! This chocolate bar is split into 4 equal parts. The dark piece is 1/4 of the chocolate bar: one quarter.

Careful! The pizza on the left has 4 pieces too, but the pieces are not equal: one is huge and one is tiny. So one of its slices is not 1/4. For a fraction, the parts must always be the same size.

The number below the fraction line is the denominator: how many equal parts is the whole split into? The number above it is the numerator: how many parts do we take?

The more equal parts we split the same pizza into, the smaller the slices get. 4 is bigger than 2, but a 1/4 slice is smaller than a 1/2 slice!

Fractions live on the number line too. Let’s split the space between 0 and 1 into 4 equal parts. When the frog hops 1 part from 0, it lands on 1/4. We count the gaps between the marks, not the marks themselves!

Summary: in a fraction, the whole is split into equal parts. The denominator tells us how many equal parts there are, and the numerator tells us how many we take. The bigger the denominator, the smaller the slice. Now try it in Block Factory!