I've been considering a new resource since January and have just got round to making it properly. The resource was inspired by these tweets:
I have an observation coming up on Tuesday. I'd have done this anyway, but the observation just made me put something together. My 7 set 1 have just revisited some percentage work - calculating percentages of amounts and increase and decrease - and on Monday will look at one amount as a percentage of another. On Tuesday, we'll look at calculating percentage profit/loss-style questions and will go through the lesson like this:
Starter - This takes up the first ten minutes of every lesson of mine. It's an opportunity for kids to get to my class room from their lesson, settle down, get their book out of their folder and write the learning objective and attempt something that we did last lesson. This starter has three pictures of bottles, with a capacity and an amount left. The ultimate question is 'Which is the most full?'. The idea of this is to have kids consider that 'fullness' is very much dependent on the size of the bottle and not the amount left in the bottle.
Introduction - I'll introduce the idea in two ways. The first is 'flipping houses', and without skipping a beat will show an image of an upside house... 'No! Not like this...', but more like this... where I found a half/half image of a before/after flipped house. I'll make up some data on the spot, about costs and sale price and we'll look at profit made on each. Some of the kids will simply compare profit, but I'm banking on a few talking about 'risk' or 'outlay' for each profit, and we'll calculate percentage profit. I'll make sure that the greater profit is the lesser percentage profit. The next way is to use an image of Del Boy and compare them to market traders selling jeans and coats, comparing percentage profits in the same way.
Activity - I haven't even thought of the activity that I'll have them do yet, and don't expect it to be an exciting one. I intend to look at a text book tomorrow and find something appropriate. If not, I'll have a dig around online tomorrow night.
Plenary - This is the bit that I'd like to share, and have uploaded to the TES web site here. @steelemaths tweeted about Storage Hunters and finding percentage increase/decrease. I watched a number of episodes and made notes about what was in each bin, how much the bin sold for and how much the bin was apparently worth. I'm using two different problems in my plenary:
This is the 'after' picture, showing a room of movie props, the winning bid by Team Brandori and the value of the bin.
Pupils are then to calculate profit, and percentage profit to indicate who 'did best' out of their investments.
The idea can be extended to different bins, obviously, but @steelemaths also suggested 'Best value', 'floor space', 'volume of unit', 'estimating' and more.
These are the notes I made on some episodes, to give some extra data:
Pool cues, golf clubs, skis, couch, mystery boxes. SOLD - $500. WORTH - $1000
Mystery Box - Casino Chips ($500)
Rubbish + covered antique grabber machine. SOLD - $450. WORTH - $3000.
Sunglasses. Watches. All knock offs. SOLD - $300. WORTH - $100.
Gun cases. (Empty) 9mm. 45. 9mm. 32. 9mm. 9mm. Rifle. Rifle. Tommy gun replica. SOLD - $900. WORTH - $5100.
Old motorbike. Run down. SOLD - $1700. WORTH - $2385.
Civil War memorabilia. Big wheels (cannon). Boxes. Fake swords. Colt revolver. Reenactment saddle. SOLD - $10,000. WORTH - $22,700.
Archery equipment. Axes. Hunting equipment. Hidden crossbow. SOLD - $1350. WORTH - $1725.
Covered hot dog stand . SOLD - $475. WORTH - $4000.
Covered Scrambler, non-starter. Silver in locker. SOLD - $2900. WORTH - $5000.
Surfboards. Skate stuff. SOLD - $1400. WORTH - $2600.
Covered golf cart. Armour. Swords. Throwing hatchets. SOLD - $1750. WORTH - $3880.
Stuffed cow. Stacked boxes. Movie props. SOLD - $550. WORTH - $1200.
Home brew kit. SOLD - $900. WORTH - $1000.
Wetbike. Engines. SOLD - $2000. WORTH - $3500.
Camera. Telescope. Security camera. Alarm system. SOLD - $2200. WORTH - $4200.
Covered tractor. Tools. SOLD - $4000. WORTH - $6550.
Quarter pipes. Skateboards. Luge boards. SOLD - $2400. WORTH - $4300.
WW2 Bin. Propeller and paraphanalia. Bomb. German mauser (sp?). SOLD - $5500. WORTH - $12000.
