Percentages: How We Use Them in Our Real Word

         
 Percentages are often a concept I struggle with, but for this post I want to discuss the various ways percentages are used in our everyday lives. I also want it to be shown that solving percentages can be made simple. It’s extremely important for educators to teach the concept of percentages thoroughly, but it’s just as important to teach students how they will be using percentages in the real world.

            In our real world, we encounter percentages in stores when their having a sale, there on our food and drink labels, the interest your bank accounts earn, in the work place, while reading data charts, food recipes, calculating tips when you go out to eat, reviewing test scores, etc.  

                                                                                       

A situation in which you may need to use percentages in the real world would be when you’re shopping at a store and they are having a sale. The sale states that everything is 40% off its regular price. You happen to come across a video game that you can’t pass up, but it’s $70 dollars! When you remember everything is 40% off its original price, you quickly try to calculate the price to see if you have enough cash.

Using the example above, 40% also means 40 out of 100.

First we would need to find 40% of $70 dollars.

40% = 40/100, and 40/100 x $70= $28

This means there will be a $28-dollar reduction from the original price.

You will pay a total of $42 dollars for the pair of jeans.

 A web resource I found gives clear, simple examples for solving percentages at the elementary level. This web site describes percentage examples through visuals, such as graphs and a pizza, along with the written instructions on how to solve the problem.

https://www.mathsisfun.com/percentage.html
I think it would be fun to teach students how to compute tips on a restaurant bill, and then bring them to a restaurant to do it themselves. The link below shows an example of how a lesson like this could be conducted.

http://www.classtrips.com/lpitem/96339/restaurant-trip-tips-lesson-plan

Another idea for incorporating percentages into the classroom is, setting an area of the classroom up as if it were a grocery store. The students can partner up and take turns going “shopping”. Each group can have a list of different groceries to locate in the grocery store. Once the students have discovered the item, they must figure out if they have enough “fake cash” to buy the item. All items will be marked with a specific percentage off, and students will work together to decide whether or not they can purchase the item.