Bits and Pieces II was created to help students make sense of one aspect of rational number: fraction operations. The investigations in this unit will help students to:
- Use benchmarks and other strategies to estimate the reasonableness of results of operations with fractions;
- Develop ways to model sums, differences, products, and quotients with areas, strips, and number lines;
- Use estimates and exact solutions to make decisions;
- Look for and generalize patterns in numbers;
- Use knowledge of fractions and equivalence of fractions to develop algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions;
- Recognize when addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is the appropriate operation to solve a problem;
- Write fact families to show the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction, and between multiplication and division;
- Solve problems using arithmetic operations on fractions; and
- Look for and generalize patterns.
