Category: Ratios and Proportions

The Ratio of Skittles

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I am so blessed that we teach ratios in the Fall!  Halloween and the day after Halloween are a cheap and easy way to obtain candy to turn into ratios and proportions.   Towards the end of our unit, students were given an assignment in Google classroom.  The only trees harmed in the activity were the ones that were under the skittles to use as “plates”.

Skittles Lesson:  Students will write the colors as a proportional relationship and solve proportions using multiple strategies including cross products.

Skittles Lab Activity – Original

Copy of Skittles Lab – Adapted

As our “Fun Friday,” students logged into Google Classroom and I previewed the activity.  It includes creating a pie chart.  You need to go to “insert”, “Chart” and then “pie.”  The students would not see the “Create in Sheets” in the lower lefthand corner, so I showed them a few times on the Smartboard.

  1.  Students were asked and able to take the ratio of different color skittles and put it in a chart.  Instead of a coordinate graph, this lesson uses a pie graph which we see a lot of proportions use as well.
  2. Students then got to eat their math which is always fun!
  3. Students turned in the lab activity in Google Classroom.  Due to time constraints, I did not do the Google Drawing section.

Smoothies and Ratios

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This Fun Friday was a LOT of fun!!  I asked the parents 2 weeks ago via Sign Up Genius to buy one food item.  The parents were happy to help contribute and I ended up with plenty of supplies.  On the day of smoothie making, I provided my huge Ikea smoothie straws, blender, vanilla and oats.

My morning class made these in the teacher’s lounge since lunchtime was far away.  It was handy to have the space and sink. My afternoon class stayed in the classroom and it still worked out well.  I made sure to have lots of napkins, wet washcloths and a disposable tablecloth (or the trash can liner works well in a pinch too!).

  1.  After our morning warm-up and Brain Pop video, the students had to get into groups of 2 or 3 and choose a smoothie recipe from the handout.

**One change I would make to the handout is that you need ice.  Smoothies taste better cold and I added a cup of ice cubes to each recipe to make it colder. **

2.  Once they picked a recipe, I gave the students *part* of the new recipe.  So for recipe #4, I gave one group 2 and a half bananas.  So they had to figure out the rest of the recipe based on that proportion.  Of course you can do this two ways:  cross multiply and divide or find the ratio.  Some students figured this out intuitively and others took a little longer.

One group received 5 strawberries instead of 4.  They figured out they needed to multiply all of their ingredients by one constant (which is faster than cross multiply and divide) – I never told them this!  It was amazing!