Lesson 7: Introduction to Fractions #2

[One speaker]

[The video begins with a white screen as it displays the problem to be solved.]

Speaker: Suppose you invited seven friends to a party and five of them attended. Give a fraction that represents the proportion of your friends who attended the party. So let’s give ourselves a visual for this.

So we’re going to draw our seven friends. ‘Kay, one, two, three, four, five [draws seven stick figures on the screen]—you’ll have to forgive my beautiful stick figures here [chuckles]—let’s see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—oh, give that person some arms [draws arms on the seventh person].

Okay, so we’ve invited those friends to a party—and here’s our house where the party is going to be [draws a little house towards the right side of the screen]—’kay, and it says five of them attended, so one, two, three, four, five [draws a box around five of the friends]. So these five friends attended the party [draws an arrow from the five friends to the house]. ‘Kay, so to set this up as a fraction [draws a line for a fraction], remember that our denominator tells us how many pieces make one whole.

Well, out of all the friends we invited, we invited seven, so seven is going to go in our denominator [puts a seven underneath the line that was just drawn], and the proportion that attended will go up top [puts ‘5’ above the line to make the fraction 5/7] because our numerator tells us how many pieces we have. So how many friends out of the total friends we invited came? Well, five friends came out of seven invited, so the answer is five-sevenths (5/7) [draws a box around 5/7].

[End of Video]