I don’t know about you but I remember being in school and learning about certain things in Maths that I was convinced I’d never need in the future. It felt futile and, to be honest, a waste of my precious childhood time. I am old enough now to admit that I was wrong about ratio and proportion. I use that knowledge all the time, whether I’m working out how to split up money, cooking or baking, budgeting for the month, or shopping for goodies! Proportion and ratio have truly proven themselves to be valuable little nuggets of knowledge in my everyday life.
So this week we focused on proportion and, let me tell you, they did a great job! It was definitely a slow start but, by the end, they were really getting the hang of ratio and they were finding the concept quite simple. The only bit that some students struggled with was when we started using measurements, which seems to always be the way! It’s important that they remember that ratio and proportion
questions are always boiling down to the same concept and the same method. They already have the
foundation knowledge of multiplication and division and they are also already applying that knowledge to questions about ratio and proportion. The only thing that’s changed is the context in which the question is being asked!
You know what’s coming next … we’ve attached an exercise! This is a fun one to get them practicing proportion and ratio questions in the context of weights and measures.
