How To Add And Subtract Like Fractions Over One Whole

Hi, I'm Felicity, and we're going to be looking a bit more today at some addition and subtraction of, like, fractions. But this time we're going to be looking at fractions that total more than one whole. So as we've established before, when we're dealing with like, fractions, the denominator always stays the same and we just deal with the numerators. So, as we can see, in this example, we have 5/7 and 3/7, which will equal 8/7 because we're just adding those numerators. As you can see, 8, 7 refers to more than one whole, which is an improper fraction. We can look at this pictorially. So, for example, with this pizza, I have 1, 2, 3 halves, which refers to more than one whole and can be written like this. Let's look at some addition examples. So here I have a bar model to show my working. So I have three fifths, as shaded in here, added to another three fifths, which can be written like this. And the answer is six fifths, because three plus three is six and we've left that denominator the same. Subtraction works in the same way, too. So here, represented by two bar models, I have five thirds. This is more than one whole, as we can see. If I were to take away one third, we can see we still need more than one whole to represent the total, and we're left with 4/3. As we explored in our last video, it can also be really useful to look at a number line so that we can help our children understand how we can add and subtract our like, fractions.