These activities will help students build their skills in working with fractions, decimals, ratios, and percent. They most directly address Grade 6 standards but connect to real-world contexts and can be extended to Grade 8 and beyond.
Activity 1: Sweet Success
Businesses that sell food products need to pay careful attention to how much of each ingredient is used. They also need to determine what price to charge for the products they sell. In this activity, students will use fractions and decimals to connect the weights and prices of fruits and nuts and calculate a sale price for an apple cherry mix.
Key standard: Understand division of fractions and extend the notion of number to the system of rational numbers, which includes negative numbers.
Materials needed: one student sheet per student
Use the Important Facts to complete the activity.
Important Facts
- Ingredients in apple cherry mix (1 bag)
- ¾ pound of dried apples
- ½ pound of dried cherries
- ¼ pound of walnuts
- Cost of ingredients
- Dried apples: $2.80 per pound
- Dried cherries: $4.48 per pound
- Walnuts: $3.96 per pound
Check your answers against the answer sheet.
Extend the project
Write a recipe for a fruit salad. Be sure to include the amount (in pounds) of each fruit in your salad. Research the cost per pound of the fruits and determine how much you should charge for your salad. Explain how you determined the cost of the salad.
Activity 2: Meet Me in St. Louis
Batting averages are an example of converting a rate to a unit rate represented as a decimal. A batting average is calculated from the ratio of a player’s hits to the number of at bats. Batting averages are usually recorded as a decimal to the thousandths place. This project connects batting averages of several players from the real-world St. Louis Cardinals team to ratios and percent.
If students are unsure how to play baseball, explain the basic idea that batters go up one at a time, attempting to hit a ball that a pitcher throws. Here’s a short video explaining the sport from the baseball education company Building Better Baseball. The batting order refers to the order the players go up to hit the ball.
Key standard: Connect ratio and rate to whole number multiplication and division, and use the concepts of ratio and rate to solve problems.
Materials needed: one student sheet per student
Use the Important Facts to complete the activity.
| PLAYER NAME | BATTING RESULTS |
| Albert Pujols (2008) | 187 hits in 524 at bats |
| Stan Musial (1948) | 230 hits in 611 at bats |
| Rogers Hornsby (1925) | 203 hits in 504 at bats |
Check answers against the answer sheet.
Extend the project
Research other types of sports statistics, such as a quarterback’s pass completion percentage in American football. Find statistics for several players, and write the numbers as fractions, decimals, and percent. Then compare the statistics of one player to those of another.
Get our FREE guide “Optimizing the Math Classroom: 6 Best Practices.”
