Ratios, Proportions, and Rates! Oh My!

This was my absolute favorite thing to teach in sixth grade! You could do so much with this unit! Especially with food 🙂 Everything is better with food right??

Before I started teaching I made a Ratio Graffiti Wall in the hall! I had seen something similar on Instagram and knew I wanted to try it!

I used velcro dots to secure markers on the wall. I kept this up the entire time I was teaching this unit and the kids wrote on the wall and took time to read what others had written. It was an awesome way to bring ratios to life! I wish I would have taken a picture of it before I took it down. Life sometimes gets in the way and you forget 🙁 You will just have to take my word for it! Here are the signs posted if you want to re-create this: Ratio Graffiti Wall

As an introduction we used Lucky Charms cereal to look at ratios, with marshmallows and oat cereal.  If you think sixth graders are too old for counting and sorting cereal you are sadly mistaken! They loved it! Kids want to be kids and sorting out food is fun, even for t’weens!

                                 

I gave each student their own bag of lucky charms, so that germs were not an issue. Students learned about part to whole ratios and part to part ratios. Students even drew models to represent ratios seen in the bag of cereal. I have this activity in my TpT store and it includes the brand new unicorn marshmallows! Lucky Ratios- A Hands-On Introduction to Ratios TEKS 6.4B 6.4E RATIOS ONLY

Next we put our knowledge to the test in a STEM challenge! I love to integrate STEM whenever possible! It was October and I knew I wanted to use catapults, because kids love to flick stuff across the room, right?! I saw pumpkin candies and knew right away that these would be fun to flick! And did you know that people flick real pumpkins in a contest every year??  That is right, it is called Pumpkin Chunkin’.  This was my inspiration!
I used plastic spoons, popsicle sticks, rubber bands and an empty aluminum can. (Since I am addicted to La Qroix, I had a bunch of cans on hand 🙂 I put all of these supplies out and told the students that they had 10 minutes to create their catapult. Using any and all of the supplies. Students worked through and problem solved to create their catapults.

 

After time was up and their catapults were made, they worked through the stations to test their catapults, using ratios of course! There was a tower test, distance test and an accuracy test. Students had an absolute blast and practiced ratios in a meaningful, real world way! You can get your copy FREE here! Pumpkin Chunkin STEM

 

We moved onto Unit Rates.  Unit rates was a new concept for me and I wanted to make it about real life shopping experiences. When I go grocery shopping with my husband, he always looks at unit rates. I usually go for price and he always goes for the best unit rate. So I made an activity called Would You Rather? It has real life, shopping experiences and goes through unit rates step by step. This is great for me, because it was new to me, so the guided notes section was so valuable to my success in teaching this concept.