OUR Grade 6 unit 2 lesson 1 Intro to Ratios

I felt that this lesson was a great introduction for students to grapple with the language of ratios and to see them come to life.

The warm-up is such a great start to the lesson. I don’t have it pictured here, but basically there are different colored shapes with different areas and arrangements of squares. This is where having the consumable workbooks from Open Up Resources really comes in handy because they are printed in vibrant color! It gets students thinking about what color categories they could be sorted into, as well as how many groups that is. Then they sort by area, and then come up with their own sorting. One student named all the types as small rectangle, square, big rectangle, small L, big L, and I forget what they called the other two shapes. Others said rectangles and non-rectangles.

The lesson plan offers a teacher collection of dinosaurs of different colors and characteristics, but I decided to use a prominent collection I’ve had up for many years: my bobblehead collection:

I brought them down in front of my display TV so kids could see them better. Here they are asked to come up with a way to categorize them. I’m glad they said the primary way I thought they would: by sport. There’s baseball, football, and basketball. They also said animals and people. A really creative one was if they had a helmet on or not. I asked if a hat is a helmet, so we revised it to headwear/headgear or not. Another suggestion was if they were in the act of playing the sport or not. This lead into us co-constructing ratio sentences based on my collection. The lesson plan is explicit to come up with one from each type of sentence. Here’s what we came up with:

After this, students sorted their own collections. I had at least one collection per table, but one group no one had brought any in so luckily I had some of Christopher Danielson’s wooden tiles to sort.

Here some students sorted B’s massive collection of erasers:

I think the 3 categories were food, animals, and non-living objects

Sorting process

Sorted! And you can see the warm-up question in the background.

Here’s their categories and data.

@trianglemancsd to the rescue!

I love how they named the pentagons crowns.

Then they were like, hey they fit together!

Afterwards, they were given an exit ticket (cool-down) with pictures of cats, mice, and dogs. I was really impressed how well students were able to apply the knowledge of the ratio sentences and the reference on the poster was a huge help for all learners. This lesson was an exciting launch into Unit 2 on Ratios!