General life and personal interests
A collection of resources designed to provide ideas and inspiration for teaching mathematics in the context of general life and personal interests. These resources have been selected as relevant to post-16 vocational learners who are working towards resitting GCSE Mathematics. Understanding Ratio, Egg Fried Rice For Two and Making a Mocktail cover ratio in a variety of contexts. Sports injuries looks at analysing data, whilst Taking a risk covers probability in unfamiliar contexts.
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Understanding Ratio
Ratio is used in a range of contexts across vocational areas and an understanding of the underlying principles is essential to support practice in application in a whole range of workplace situations. The early examples in this resource are all about mixing orange squash and water in particular ratios, but these could be replaced with suitable examples from vocational areas. Similarly, the questions designed for childcare learners could be replaced with more relevant examples for learners from other specialisms.
The focus of this session is on combining quantities in a given ratio. Dividing a quantity in a given ratio is required for the application of the ideas to a childcare context included at the end of the session.
When they have completed this session, learners should be able to:
• Identify the ratio of two quantities
• Understand the ratio notation
• Understand the meaning of ratio
• Identify equivalent ratios
• Combine quantities in a given ratio
• Divide a quantity into a given ratio.
Egg Fried Rice for Two
Given the recipe to make egg fried rice for two people, students are required to adapt the recipe to serve different amounts of people. Further tasks ask students to work out how many servings can be made given a limited amount of ingredients and express the proportion of one ingredient to another.
Making a Mocktail
This activity aims to engage learners because of its connection to everyday life and the mathematical ideas of measurement and ratio underpin work in vocational areas such as Hairdressing when mixing hair dye and Construction when mixing concrete. This activity requires students to understand and use common measures for volume, use estimation and measurement and understand and use ratios.
Is It Fair?
This activity provides an opportunity for work on inverse proportion, conversion calculations, compound percentage change and information handling skills.
Sports injuries
This resource looks at which sport is the most dangerous. Students need to analyse the data and produce appropriate graphs
Taking a risk
This resource looks at risk taking and insurance. Students look at simple probability and working out premiums
General Life and Personal Interest (Other sources of ideas)
A collection of resources which provide ideas and inspiration for teaching mathematics in the context of general life and personal interest. The resources included in this collection require some adaptation to make them appropriate for the particular audience.