Kevin and Alanna enter the clubhouse and find Norm on the telephone ordering his all time fave, a large cheese quesadilla! But could they slice it into four pieces instead of eight as he can’t eat that many slices. Alanna is keen on helping Uncle Norm grasp the concept of fractions. She and her classmates have been asked to prepare different foods for school, foods from around the world, and she’ll need todivide up her dish into equal portions. So while Kevin does some research she’ll visit an expert to get some hands-on fraction action up close and relay the info to Uncle Norm, “This WE gotta see.”

The Gist: In the curriculum, children are required to use concrete materials to represent fractions, divide whole objects into equal parts, and identify the parts using fractional names (e.g., one half; three thirds; two fourths or two quarters), and equivalent fractions - and to solve problems that arise from real-life situations. This episode is also about the parts of fractions. The bottom part of a fraction is called the denominator: it “names,” or indicates, the type of fraction that is described by the numerator (the top part). The denominator of a fraction tells you how many parts a whole is broken into. It can be a whole pineapple, a whole song, or a whole anything. If the denominator of a fraction is 4, then that indicates that the whole whatever is broken up into 4 equally-sized pieces. The word numerator comes from the Latin verb “enumerate,” and counts the number of equally-sized pieces identified by the denominator that are contained in the fraction.