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  • Making Discount Meaningful

    Educators teaching math typically start with the “mathy” stuff first. For example, for finding the sales price teachers may start with showing students the steps to calculate (photo below). I start with the concept, either with a pictorial representation or actual objects to represent the underlying concept. In the photo above, I show an object (related to…

  • Number Lines to Represent Percents

    I am following the blog Adventures at the Pond (author has some great stuff!) and the following photo was posted on this blog.  This is an excellent alternate representation of a concept. I do not know how the author would present this in class but here’s what I would do. I would give the students the…

  • Engagement Through Individual Interest

    I have a student with autism who loves comic books, especially DC and Marvel, and is often disinterested in the math I have to offer. In an activity to shop for clothes using a $200 gift card, 40% discount and 6% sales tax I gave this student a print out of comic books for his…

  • Matching Cards for Discount and Tax

      This is a photo of matching cards for the topic of percent discount and percent tax. Students are given a card with an item to buy, a percent discount and our state tax rate of 6% (not listed). We’ve identified 4 steps for to find the total amount to pay the cashier: compute discount,…

  • Scaffolding Percent Discount and Tax

      This is a snippet of a handout that is a follow up to a previous percent activity that I posted. It walks students through the mathematical steps including subtracting the price. I found that the cutting part of the previous activity was effective but the steps were not as clear. This handout is an…

  • Percent Discount Scaffolded and Concrete

    I continue to be surprised at how much of a challenge computing percent discount is for students. It’s prior knowledge. If you ask them to explain what a discount is in their own words you’ll get a response like “it makes something cost less.” The students may even have mastery of computing a percent of…

  • Conceptual Understanding

    I gave a student a pop quiz on percent change – find discount and tax – after she completed  independent practice on this objective. The student followed the steps very well, as you can see in the photo (I added the ink later) up to the very end. At that point she added the tax…