Once a child can add and subtract fractions, the next question is when to. These free printable worksheets put fractions inside real situations — recipes, juice, ribbon, pizza — so the fraction arithmetic has a reason to happen.
If they get stuck
The answer key prints on a separate page.
The stories are the kind where fractions genuinely live: a recipe that needs part of a cup and then a little more, a length of ribbon with some used up, two people sharing one pizza. Grade four keeps the denominators the same so the focus is the situation; grade five moves to unlike denominators, where a child has to find a common denominator before the story can be answered. Multiplying shows up as whole batches of a fractional amount — four loaves that each need part of a cup.
Every answer is exact and reduced to lowest terms, and shared-whole problems never total more than one — two people can eat 5/8 and 2/8 of a pizza, never 9/8 of it. These sheets are made to print and work on paper rather than tap out on a screen, since the answer is a fraction.
One question from a sheet like this one, worked a step at a time — with a sentence saying what just happened and why.
Fraction word problems, step by step