Make the renaming step something students do with their hands before they do it with a pencil.
- Paper-strip folding. Give each student two identical paper strips. Fold one into thirds and shade 1/3; fold the other into thirds and then in half again to make sixths. Laying the strips together shows that the shaded third is exactly two sixths — students physically create the equivalence they will later write as ×2 top and bottom.
- Fraction-tile addition. To solve 1/2 + 1/4, students place a half tile and a quarter tile end to end, then find which single-size tiles cover the total exactly (three quarter tiles). Swapping the half tile for two quarter tiles IS the renaming step.
- Human fraction wall. Groups of students hold denominator cards and arrange themselves into a living wall; the teacher calls a sum and the "thirds" students must trade places with the right number of "sixths" students to make the parts match.
- Trade-up subtraction. For 7/8 - 1/4, students build seven eighth-tiles, then must physically remove a quarter — discovering they need to trade the quarter for two eighths before anything can be taken away.