Focussing firstly on what percentages are and how they are equivalent to fractions and decimals, these five lessons provide a firm foundation of knowledge and skills which children can build upon as their understanding of ratio, percentage and proportion grows during Years 5 and 6.

A number of strategies are demonstrated which enable children to find percentages using their times tables and place value knowledge. There are opportunities to read and interpret statistics and charts where data is given as percentages. Children will also begin to learn how any percentage may be found by first calculating what one per cent of an amount is.

Included are a variety of worksheets, games and other activities where children can practise and consolidate their learning, use problem solving and maths reasoning skills to find percentages using doubling or halving, and improve their recall of common percentage/fraction/decimal equivalents.

What are percentages?

To kick things off, children will define what percentages are, with reference to percentages given in statistics such as ’10% of adults in the UK play sport regularly’. They’ll go on to learn that percentages can also be expressed as hundredths, and that therefore they are equivalent to other fractions. After that, children are challenged to recognise some common percentages and their equivalent fractions, and learn how percentages may be converted into decimal numbers, too.

Percentages of Hundreds

The included slides firstly show some percentage data presented using pie charts and stacked bar charts. Children are challenged to read and interpret the data shown. After that, a simple method for finding percentages of amounts that are exact multiples of 100 is demonstrated. As well as practising this, children will also consider ways in which percentages of amounts which are a half and a quarter of 100 (e.g. £50) may be calculated.

Comparing Percentages

Adding to children’s bank of strategies for calculating percentages, the included slides demonstrate a four-cell method that can be used for solving percentage problems. This method is particularly useful for comparing percentages of different amounts, which children are challenged to do as they are presented with a variety of challenging problems.

Finding One Per Cent

In this lesson, children will begin to develop and use the standard algorithm for calculating percentages, focussing on the first of its two steps: finding one per cent. A method for finding one per cent using place value knowledge is demonstrated, which children will put into practice straight away as they solve problems where they must find one, two or three per cent of multiples of 100.

Percentages of Any Amount

Building on the week’s learning, this lesson demonstrates finding one, two or three per cent of any amount, including those where one per cent is a decimal number (e.g. 1% of £150 is £1.50). There’s a number of problems where children must find percentages by drawing upon the skills they’ve developed in previous lessons, including using times tables, place value knowledge, and four-cell models to visualise and solve problems.