Ratios and Rates Videos {Mid-Week Math Motivation}

Ratios, Rates and Proportional Reasoning is a pretty big unit for sixth grades.  It is one of the largest shifts in the Common Core Curriculum as students make a change from a dominant Place Value math standard to learning about the comparison of numbers with reasoning.  Today I wanted to share a few video resources that I use in the classroom to help make this unit more engaging.

Have you seen this video my Math Antics?  One of the things I LOVE about this video is the explanation of how ratios are a comparison of numbers.  It explains to students how we often think that a comparison is a greater than or less than relationship, but ratios is a relationship of numbers with division.  Great guidance!!

This video is a great way to review the concepts of ratios before getting into more of the specifics of rates.

When I teach about Unit Rates and Unit pricing, I show my students this video from Consumer Reports.  It gives them a great overview, and they can go to the grocery store and see it in action!

It's interesting within the video to see that not all grocery stores and companies compare unit prices the same.  For example, some share their product in ounces, while others share the unit rate in pounds.  It was a great way to add in some ELA standards as we briefly discussed the need for universal unit pricing!  Anytime you can add in a cross-curriculum concept that makes the top even more REAL WORLD applicable!!

I always tell me kids to try and save their parents at least $5.00 in the grocery store using unit rates, and maybe their payback will be a treat or candy bar with the savings!

Finally, my kids LOVE Ratey the Math Cat from Math Snacks:

I like this goofy video because I can pause it at different times while my students figure out what the unit rates would be, or what several different equivalent rates are within the real world scenarios.

Thanks for stopping by for a little Mid- Week Math Motivation!  I'd love to hear about videos that you use in your math units!