Program details

What's covered

Fractions skills are taught through interactive lessons, and reinforced in a corresponding practice. From partitive and quotitive division, all the way back to understanding that a fraction is a single number, if it’s a fractions-related standard, we’ve got a lesson covering it!   Amplify Fractions’ lessons require approximately 15 minutes to complete. The feedback students receive is personalized, and will vary based on students’ skill levels. The content is divided into three sets, each of which is sub-divided into strands of lessons.

Intro to Fractions
Standards  Alignment:  Grade 3 

These 15 lessons emphasize that every fraction is a single quantity with a unique place on the number line. Fractions are modeled using rectangular area models, circles, and other shapes, as well as length models. Improper fractions (we know there’s nothing “improper” about them!) and mixed numbers are also introduced. Fair sharing and division of whole numbers is also reviewed.

Equivalence & Comparison, Adding & Subtracting
Standards Alignment: Grades 3-5  (Primarily Grade 4) 

In these 17 lessons, students first explore when fractions are greater, less than, or equivalent to other fractions. A variety of comparison techniques are also introduced (e.g., rounding, benchmarks, etc.), as well as simplification. They continue with addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers with common denominators. Once generating equivalent fractions with common denominators is established, students then compare, add, and subtraction fractions with different denominators.

Multiplying & Dividing
Standards Alignment: Grade 4-6 (Primarily Grade 5)

The final 19 lessons deep-dive into multiplying and dividing fractions. Students explore multiplication using rectangular area models, as repeated addition (a whole number times a fraction), and as a fractional operator (a fraction times a whole number or fraction). Multiplicative commutativity is established, and used as a strategy for more efficient multiplication. Both partitive and quotitive division are explored. Quotitive division utilizes a manipulative where one fraction is duplicated inside of another with area models, while partitive division is used to intuitively arrive at the algorithm for division (“flip the divisor and multiply”).

Pedagogical approach

Amplify Fractions has been designed using some of the most foundational and research-based pedagogical strategies. Amplify Fractions includes unprecedented personalized feedback to each student and how they’re thinking about the math and story-driven instruction that keeps students engaged and motivated. The scope and sequence covers everything fractions, tied to learning progressions of conceptual understanding as well as standards.

Get full details on how these strategies are reflected in Amplify Fractions, along with the research behind them from one of the creators of Amplify Fractions, Zach Wissner-Gross Ph.D.

You can also check out our white paper: Teaching Fractions through Adaptive Storytelling. In this white paper, we also detail the success of classrooms involved in Amplify Fractions pilots. You can read the story of one classroom’s success here.

This document contains the most important things you need to know about Amplify Fractions (including research, success stories, etc.) when you are sharing the program or recommending or justifying an Amplify Fractions purchase to your school or district.

Standards alignment 

Amplify Fractions lessons are aligned to educational standards, including the Common Core Math Standards, as well as other state standards. Along with our interactive lessons being aligned to standards, there are unlimited practice problems that are designed to help students with each required standard.

This is how lessons and practice align to the Common Core State Standard for Mathematics.

Here are how lessons and practice align to all states’ standards.

Suggestions for using with your students

Each lesson takes about 15 minutes to complete, but varies based on students’ skill levels. Practice can take as long as students choose to participate.

There are many ways Amplify Fractions can be incorporated into your district, school or classroom curriculum. Here are a few of our recommendations:

• Independent Class Time: Devoting one class period every week to having students work independently on Amplify Fractions. While students are working independently on devices, teachers can work with small groups who need extra support with fractions or other topics.
• Classroom Rotation Centers: Using Amplify Fractions in one of the rotation centers in your classroom, so students can work independently.
• Review: Using Amplify Fractions both inside and outside the classroom (at home, or in computer labs or media centers), so students can consistently practice their fractions skills, building a solid fractions foundation.
• Homework: Regularly assigning Amplify Fractions to students as homework. Because students move through the content at different paces, teachers may want to assign one strand per week and ask students to work on practice for the rest of the week after they complete a strand.
• Supplemental Classroom Instruction: Using a Smartboard or other projection device to display an interactive lesson in front of the whole class when introducing that skill, and then having the students go into the program to complete the lesson independently, along with the associated practice to reinforce the skill.
• After-School Programs: Using Amplify Fractions to reinforce previously presented concepts and allowing students to work on the content they need at their own pace.
• Summer School Programs: Using Amplify Fractions to reinforce previously presented concepts and allowing students to work on the content they need at their own pace.
• Summer Practice: Tasking students with completing the appropriate lessons and practice of Amplify Fractions as a review over the summer, so they don’t lose their fraction skills, and are also prepared to take on the next year’s math content.
• Flipped Classroom: Having students complete the interactive lesson of Amplify Fractions each night as homework, and then using class time to engage the whole class in rich discussions of the content around the lesson, complete the practice, and differentiate other instructional opportunities based on individual student needs.
• Core Replacement: Treating each set of Amplify Fractions as a 2–4 week mini-unit that can be inserted between units of core curriculum instruction.