Instruct your students to prepare flash cards, writing the answer down on one side and the equation on the other. You can use flash cards to give your students practice adding, subtracting, multiplying or diving percentages. Alternately, you can instruct them to create flash cards with greater than or less than equations, asking them to decide which fraction is larger. Pair off your students and instruct them to take turns quizzing each other with their flash cards. Encourage your students to teach each other tricks for how to remember solutions to different percentages.
Show your students pictures to demonstrate the difference between percentages, giving them a visual image of what percentages mean. Use circular pictures first, because most students find them the easiest to interpret, such as pizzas, cookies or pies. Show them pictures of the food, along with the fraction and percentages that the picture represents. For instance, you could show them a picture of part of a pizza with the label, "3/4 = 0.75 percent."
Pass out packages of colored candy pieces to your class. Instruct your students to take a piece of paper and draw the horizontal and vertical lines of a graph. Then tell them to write the names of the colors along the bottom of the horizontal graph line. Instruct your students to separate their candy into colors and place them on their graph paper in a vertical line over the candy color for each piece, forming a candy graph. Now ask each student to count the number of pieces of candy from their package and write that number down on another piece of paper, as well as the individual numbers of each color from their package. Once they finish, instruct them to turn those numbers into percentages by dividing the number of each color by the total number from their package. Let them know that they can eat the candy while they work out their percentages.
Money is an excellent tool for teaching percentages. Make change for a dollar, using many different coins, and place the coins in a hat. Walk around your class, instructing each student to reach into the hat, pull out some change and count it. Have them write the value of the change on a piece of paper and place the coins back in the hat for the next student. Show them how you can place a decimal point in front of the number and a percent sign after the number to turn it into a percent of a dollar.