How to help your child at home
There are lots of ways you can help your child to understand ratio and proportion. Here are just a few ideas:
1. Explore ratio
The concept of ratio is used in many daily activities such as cooking, using maps, or reading scale drawings. It can be very helpful to talk to your child about where and why we use ratio in our daily lives. For example:
A flapjack recipe requires 240g of oats. This makes 18 flapjacks. What quantity of oats is needed to make 24 flapjacks?
The ratio 240:18 can be established, and used to come to the answer320g.
These types of problems will provide the foundation for formal approaches to ratio and proportion they will come across later – and you are bound to keep your child interested in ratios if you use them to make flapjacks!
2. Find percentages in real life
There are percentages to explore everywhere in the real world. For example, what percentage of your child’s class are girls? If there is 25% off the cost of something at the shops, how much money are you saving? Can you then subtract this to find out the new price?
Your child could do a survey with friends and family. For example, they could ask everyone what their favourite food is and then work out the percentage of people that chose each type of food.
3. Play the matching card game
Create some simple cards showing problems such as 15% of 300, then write the solutions to the problems on different cards. Use the cards to play pairs or snap, or just challenge your child to find the correct answer to each problem from the answer pile.
If your child has siblings, adding a bit of healthy competition to this game could help them get flying in no time!
4. Get creative
This fun salt dough craft activity is a fun way to make decorations or ornaments and practise measuring and using ratios while you are at it.
And finally, don’t worry if you are not sure how to calculate with ratios – take a look at the examples from earlier on this page or read up on ratios in our education glossary for more advice.
Want more?
To help your child’s learning further, you may want to watch some of the videos included within our dedicatedmaths library. If you’re looking for more ideas to support learning at home,head over to ourmaths blogto explore articles full of top tips and fun activities.
