Ratio / Proportion / Rates Investigation Sharing

Sharing our Investigations

From where the children self-assessed where they felt they were at and what they wanted to find out next regarding strategies we use for ratios / proportions /rates ( Blog Post ), I thought of some different ways they could investigate using real life situations.  Not the typical 'real life situation' word problems such as a girl has 266 yellow flowers.......found on the net that are really stretching any relevance children might have to why we learn how to use ratios.


So, I ended up creating 4 investigations of varying levels of understanding.

After the groups investigated, they then presented their findings in poster form ensuring they included the strategies they tried using.

Groups were partnered up and each had 5-10 minutes to share what they did.

Usually my students are pretty great at engaging themselves in these sharing discussions, but of course, some need extra support in how to discuss.  

So, before we began sharing, we brainstormed a list of possible questions they could ask the group teaching them.  This is what we came up with:

What could we ask?

° Which strategy did you use?

Follow up questions:

– Why did you use that strategy? 

– What did you find interesting about that strategy? 

– Would you use that strategy again? Why/Why not?

° Would you use that strategy again?  Why / Why not?

° Did you make any connections during your investigations?

° Was this all new to you or did you know some of this before?

° What important discoveries have you made?

Quite a great load of questions  we thought!

We kept this displayed on the data screen to refer to if needed.

These two partner groups imagined they owned a Mini-Cooper.  

They found out the fuel consumption of the car and then calculated how much it would cost in petrol to drive to different cities in Europe (their choice) from where we live in Lausanne.

( They were able to search the Internet to find driving distances from Lausanne)

In our self-assessment and enquiry, those children had indicated they felt they were ready to learn about rates so I thought this investigation would be an interesting introduction to the concept.







These next partners were given the information that the A380 aeroplane travels at an average speed of 900 km/hr.

If we wanted to go on a holiday outside of Europe, but we didn't want to travel longer than 10 hours, where could we travel to and how long would it take?


They didn't have access to the Internet, but they did have access to atlases.  using the atlases required them to use the scale map ratios to measure the distances to places from Lausanne. (Double ratio thinking- yes!)

Whilst sharing their investigation, this partner group discovered they had actually made a calculation error, but both they and those they were sharing with still liked how they tried the double line strategy and that was what was most important (Exactly- and without me needing to prod that idea):

Whilst these children were conducting these investigations, others were investigating how to make Pancake Recipe Proportions and others were working out strategies for Ratio & Proportion of Eggs on a Free-Range Chicken Farm




All of these different enquiries taking place in the same classroom at the same time catering to different levels and wonderings that they essentially selected by using our strategies continuum: 

( How to create the continuum   )



Finally, to help each learner conceptualise and reflect on what they had learnt from other groups, we spent some time adding more of our new understandings to our journey maps which are being used as our formative and summative assessment for our unit:

( Ratios Formative & Summative )