First give students a Daily Values Table and fast-food restaurants menus. Instruct students to choose three meals for the day for which they must not have two have the same item and they must have one drink with each meal. Next, students will tally the amount of protein, calories and fat for all of their "meals" for that day. Finally, the class will calculate the percentile in which their daily values fall with regard to recommended daily values. I.e.: if the student's intake of protein was 30 grams and the RDI was 50, the student divides 30 by 50 to get an answer of .6. Then the student must multiply .6 by 100 to get the percentage (60 percent), indicating that the student ate only 60 percent of the recommended daily value for protein.
To couple learning percentages with getting physically fit, have students track their running mileage goals during the course of one month. Set one day a week for the class to run during gym class and at the end of each weekly session have students calculate where their actual performance stands compared to their projected performance. Students will divide the number of miles actually completed by those projected to find their percentile ranking in terms of their goals. In this way, each week will count as a quarter of the total goal. At the end of the month, present the students that have reached or gone past their goals with a recognition certificate.
First prepare sets of cards with percentage questions on one side and the answers to the questions on the other sides. Prior to playing the game, review percentage question patterns. Upon review, separate students into pairs and give each set of students 15 percentage question cards. The objective is for the student with the card in the pair to ask his/her partner to guess the percentage on the card. The pair that completes their set of cards first wins the game.
Separate students into pairs. Both students will play the role of store managers at a retail store. Their job will be to markup and discount errors of two workers. To identify mark-up and discount percentage errors, students will be provided with an actual price registry and another sheet with the listed prices. Students will present their findings in their math notebook or in front of the class for the teacher's review.