Math Lesson Plan: Finding the Percent of a Number

Objective: Students will be able to find the percentage of a number.

Lesson Opening

1. I want to remind you of something we talked about yesterday. Since the marking period is coming to a close, we will have to once again do a writing exercise for each of our four subjects. In math, you are going to do a survey, and then you'll have to write your answer as a fraction, decimal and a percent. Therefore, it is very important that you know how the three are related.

1. Yesterday, we learned how to compare fractions, decimals and percents. Today, we will quickly revisit that topic and then move on to learn some more about percents.

Guided Practice

1. Remember that if you want to find the percentage from a fraction, you need to make that fraction out of 100. If you want to find the percentage from a decimal, you need to multiply by 100. Have the children do a few of these problems just to refresh their memory.

1. What you didn't realize was that I was actually making it easy for you when I divided square into 100. The reason it was easy is that you were being asked to find the percentage of a specific number which was 100. Since percentage is out of 100, it was easy.

1. But finding the percentage of another number, such as 8 or 15 is more difficult. To do this, you can't deal with the percent. You have to turn the percent into a decimal. Then you need to remember that when you see the word "of" in math, it means multiply. Therefore if the English sentence is 5% of 8 is what, then the math sentence is .05 x 8 =

1. Therefore, if you are finding out what 5% of 7 is, you turn 5% = .05 then multiply the two together to get 3.5

Independent Practice

1. Pass out sheets that have both skills on it: converting fractions and decimals to percents and finding the percent of a number.

Closing

1. Ask the children to put their answers on the board.