Description
What our Percentages – Finding the Whole lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Percentages – Finding the Whole teaches students how to find the whole in percentage problems. Students learn to do this using the proportion method. At the end of the lesson, students will be able to calculate the missing whole of percentage problems using the proportion method. This lesson is for students in 5th grade and 6th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the blue box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.
Options for Lesson
Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. One optional addition to this lesson is to have your students use the newspaper or Internet to find changes in prices to find the percent of the increase or decrease. If some of your students are struggling, you can reexamine the concept of percent as a fraction out of 100. If you have more advanced students, you can begin to incorporate percentages greater than 100 and discuss the meaning of a percent over 100.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
PERCENTAGES – FINDING THE WHOLE LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Percentages – Finding the Whole
The Percentages – Finding the Whole lesson plan includes two content pages. It’s important to learn how to calculate percentages, parts, and the whole. You will often only have two of the three components and must solve for the missing piece.
To find a missing part, you can use the proportion method. This method sets the pieces up as two ratios or fractions. Using this method is an easy way to solve these problems.
The proportion method is set up as part/whole = percent/100. The percent is the number with the percent sign, the part is the number with the word “is,” and the whole is the number with the word “of”. The 100 is constant, because a percent is always a number out of 100.
Examples
Let’s look at an example. 75% of what number is 6? To solve, we first need to figure out what part is missing. Because the question includes the word “of,” we know that we need to find the whole. Next, we need to determine which numbers correspond to which pieces of the proportion. The percent is the number with the percent symbol and part is the number with the word “is,” so the percent is 75 and the part is 6.
Next, we plug the numbers into the proportion: 6/x = 75/100, where x is the unknown whole. We then cross multiply the find the missing whole: 6*100 = 75*x becomes 600 = 75x, which becomes 600/75 = 75x/75, which finally gives us our final answer of 8 = x. Therefore, the solution is that 75% of 8 is 6.
Let’s look at another example. 12.5% of what number is 27? To solve, we multiply the two numbers found diagonally from one another and divide by the remaining number: 27*100/12.5 = 216. Therefore, our final answer is that 12.5% of 216 is 27.
PERCENTAGES – FINDING THE WHOLE LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Percentages – Finding the Whole lesson plan includes four worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, a homework assignment, and a quiz. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.
COLORING PAGE ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
For the activity worksheet, students will use at least three different colors to create a coloring page. Each color should have a range for the set of solutions to the problems. For example, one of the instructions could read, “Color all answers between 0 and 20 red, 21 and 40 blue, and 41 and above green.” The students will create at least eight problems.
SOLVING PROBLEMS PRACTICE WORKSHEET
The practice worksheet asks students to solve five percent proportion problems, one of which is a word problem.
PERCENTAGES – FINDING THE WHOLE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
For the homework assignment, students will solve eight problems using the proportion method.
QUIZ
This lesson also includes a quiz that you can use to test students’ understanding of the lesson material. For the quiz, students will write the proportion method formula and give a definition for each component.
Worksheet Answer Keys
This lesson plan includes answer keys for the practice worksheet, the homework assignment, and the quiz. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
