Fractions are a way of talking about pieces of something. If you have a whole pizza and you cut it into slices, a fraction can describe how much of the pizza you're about to eat. It's a number that represents a part of a whole.

Imagine a chocolate bar that's made of four equal squares. If you eat one of those squares, you've eaten one out of four pieces. We write this as the fraction $1/4$.

Every fraction has two parts: a top number and a bottom number, separated by a line. Each has a specific job.

Think of the denominator as the total number of slices in our pizza or squares in our chocolate bar.

So, if you ate three slices of a pizza cut into eight slices, you ate $3/8$ of the pizza. The numerator (3) is how many slices you had, and the denominator (8) is the total number of slices.

Sometimes it's easier to understand a fraction by seeing it. We can draw fractions in a few different ways.

Another powerful way to visualize fractions is on a number line. We know where whole numbers like 0, 1, and 2 live. Fractions are the numbers that exist in the spaces between those whole numbers.

This number line shows the space between 0 and 1. By dividing it into four equal parts, we can pinpoint exactly where the fraction $3/4$ is located.