Add mixed numbersDenominators to 8
Name: Date:
Add. Write each answer as a mixed number in simplest form.
1447+113=
2418+516=
3458+316=
4258+434=
5323+434=
6225+323=
7256+158=
8213+527=
Adding mixed numbers worksheets
A mixed number is a whole and a fraction traveling together, and adding two of them is easy right up to the moment the fraction parts make more than one. These free printable worksheets keep to addition with unlike denominators, so the carry is the whole lesson.
Kid stuck on one? You don’t just get the sheet.
Adding mixed numbers
The answer key prints on a separate page.
What's on this sheet
Two things pile up here and both sit at the boundary between the whole and the fraction. First the denominators are unlike, so each fraction has to be rewritten over a common bottom before anything adds — one half and one third become three sixths and two sixths. Then the fraction parts can make more than a whole: 2 3/4 + 1 1/2 is not 3 5/4, it is 4 1/4, and the extra whole carries across.
Why this sheet works
Questions that cross a whole and questions that do not are drawn as separate groups, so a page never fills with comfortable sums that never test the carry. That split is the standard rather than a garnish, and it is what keeps a child from finishing eight questions without once meeting the step the sheet is about.
How this one works
One question from this sheet, worked through a step at a time.
4 + 1
4+1
4=4
1=1
4+1
+=
+=
4+1=5
+=
4+1=5
=5
- A mixed number is a whole and a fraction stuck together. Deal with them separately — wholes with wholes, sevenths with thirds.
- The fraction halves are different sizes, so cut both into 21ths first: 4 4/7 is 4 12/21, and 1 1/3 is 1 7/21.
- The fractions go together first: 12/21 + 7/21 = 19/21.
- Then the wholes: 4 + 1 = 5.
- So the answer is 5 19/21.