Ratio and Percent
Strand: Number
Outcomes: 5 and 6
Step 3: Plan for Instruction
Guiding Questions
- What learning opportunities and experiences should I provide to promote learning of the outcomes and permit students to demonstrate their learning?
- What teaching strategies and resources should I use?
- How will I meet the diverse learning needs of my students?
A. Assessing Prior Knowledge and Skills
Before introducing new material, consider ways
to assess and build on students' knowledge and
skills related to patterns, perimeter and area.
Ways to Assess and Build on Prior Knowledge and Skills 
B. Choosing Instructional Strategies
Consider the following instructional strategies for teaching ratio and percent.
- Introduce and reinforce the ratio and percent by using a variety of real-world contexts that include whole regions and whole sets.
- Connect the ratio and percent to prior knowledge about the meaning of fractions and equivalent fractions. Explore the similarities and differences between ratios and fractions.
- Emphasize the importance of establishing what the whole region or the whole set is before finding ratios or percents related to regions or sets.
- Encourage students to communicate their thinking by connecting manipulatives, diagrams and symbols to represent the concepts.
- Introduce ratios first, including part-to-whole and part-to-part ratios, and then introduce percent as a specific ratio (part-to-whole) out of 100. Explore the similarities and differences between ratios in general and percent.
- "Create a classroom environment that encourages student exploration, questioning, verification and sense making" (NCTM 1992, p. 5).
- Provide students with a variety of problems that apply the concepts of ratio and percent. Encourage them to solve the problems in different ways and explain the process. Also, provide time for students to share their solutions with others. Stimulate class discussion to critically evaluate the various procedures. Emphasize understanding, flexibility and efficiency when students select problem-solving strategies.
- To promote flexible thinking, provide a variety of problems in which two out of the following three are given and the third must be found: the whole, the part and the percent (NCTM 2000, p. 215).
- "Use the terms part, whole, and percent (or fraction). Fraction and percent are interchangeable. Help students see … percent exercises as the same types of exercises they did with simple fractions" (Van de Walle and Lovin 2006, p. 121).
- "Require students to use models or drawings to explain their solutions. It is better to assign three problems requiring a drawing and an explanation than to give 15 problems requiring only computation and answers. Remember that the purpose is the exploration of relationships, not computational skill" (Van de Walle and Lovin 2006, p. 121).
- Explore ratio patterns and encourage students to make and critique generalizations.
C. Choosing Learning Activities
The following learning activities are examples
that could be used to develop student understanding
of the concepts identified in Step 1.
Sample Activities:
Grade 6
