Build basic fraction concepts from students’ informal understandings of sharing and proportion.

Children have an intuitive understanding of basic fraction concepts, such as dividing a whole object into equal pieces or sharing a set of objects among a group of people, by as early as preschool. Teachers can structure activities that create connections between this informal knowledge of sharing and the formal fraction concepts of ordering and equivalence relationships. Informal sharing can be presented in terms of division (e.g., partitioning objects into groups of the same size) or ratio (e.g., the number of objects in relation to the number of people sharing).