Decimals and Percentages - Understand Percentages - Presentation

The lesson on understanding percentages is an engaging and interactive session designed to deepen students' grasp of percentages as parts per hundred. The lesson begins with a discussion prompt that encourages students to think about what 'percent' means and where they have heard the term 'cent' before, prompting them to connect it with concepts they already know. As the lesson unfolds, students are presented with various diagrams and are tasked with completing sentence stems to articulate the percentage that is shaded, such as "There are ___ parts per hundred shaded. This is ___%." This activity helps to visually reinforce the concept of percentages as fractions of a hundred.

Building on the initial activity, students are then challenged with more complex tasks that require them to fill in tables by matching pictorial representations to the corresponding parts per hundred and percentages. For example, they might see a diagram indicating 32 parts per hundred and need to write down that this equates to 32%. Further exercises include understanding what 100% represents and completing bar models to visually represent different percentages. The lesson also incorporates reasoning activities, such as interpreting a partially shaded hundred square to determine possible, likely, and impossible percentages, and applying percentage knowledge to real-life scenarios like test scores and comparing quantities. Independent work and group discussions round out the lesson, prompting students to explore percentages through various representations and contexts.