Percentages and Water Footprint

Percentages and Water Footprint

Adrien Gagnon, Chia Tien, and Letao Zhang

This lesson is about understanding percentages. How to interpret the meaning of ‘%’ and how to convert a decimal number to  a percentage. Students will be asked about how to solve some example exercises with an interactive questionnaire. Two lists of exercises will be assigned, one to do during class time, and one to be done at home. At the end of the class, students will be asked to respond to a survey questionnaire about their water consumption on the internet that every student will be able to access easily with the link provided, or fill out a paper copy (link provided below).


Lesson Plan: Mathematics– Percentages

Objectives:

  • Students will gain perceptual cognition for the math concept–percentage.
  • Students will be familiar with the basic knowledge of percentage through the activity.

Minds-on:

  • Graphic Organizer: (Check out the prezi link in the activity part.)
  • Anticipation Guide questions: Anticipation Guide for Water Footprint

 

  1. Estimation of 1 toilet flush.

 

  1. How much water do you use for brushing your teeth?

 

  1. How much water do you use in a load laundry?

 

  1. How much water do you use for a bath?

 

  1. How much water do you use for a shower?

 

  1. How much water do human beings need per day on average?

 

  1. How much water is successfully re-used per year on average?

 

Activities:

Consolidations:

  • Exercises: (Shown in the prezi link)
  • Homework Questions
  • Water Footprint: this is the activity that students keep track of their water usage by recording the water consumption as instructed above.

Below are downloadable versions of both our Lesson plan, Survey, and Homework Questions.

Percentages and Water Consumption Lesson Plan

Water Consumption Survey Form

Math Homework – Percentages

NOTE: The purpose to the online survey is only supposed to be used as a template.  Those who wish to obtain their own data about their classroom may copy the form into their own drive, and subsequently provide the students with a link to your own classroom Google Form.  Otherwise any submitted answers to the form above will be received by the creators of this post, and will not be observable by the general public.


Praxis Paper

  In this project, we mainly based our reflections on the theory of multimodal strategies. As instructed in our textbook, inquiries, workshops, and projects, which are done with the power of internet, are strongly encouraged. This motivated us to design a lesson plan which is intended to apply most of these strategies in the math content area.

As we were learning about internet inquiries, we started to think about how to get the students engaged. Our prominent belief was that such an inquiry must be close to daily life. Therefore, we decided to create a lesson plan that covers water usage and its relation to mathematical percentages. However, conducting research on Google is boring and is not focused enough for our classroom setting. We decided to change our way of inquiry to harness the potential of Google Forms. We did our own prior research on Google, to obtain a general questionnaire format, then created our own survey for the students to complete on Google Forms. This survey incorporates the required knowledge into the questions, and engages the students more because they need to answer the questions in order to gain the required knowledge. Teachers may then easily calculate the statistics from the answers of the classroom with the built-in summary report provided by Google Forms. In summary, no matter which aspect chosen to be related to internet inquiry, we believe that our project addresses this developmental process to a great degree.

Since the Google tools to be used are provided online (Google Forms, Google Excels etc.), we think that the instructor should run an internet workshop. Thus we made an instructional video to teach all of the necessary skills related to these tools. However, this video is not solely intended to be used in conjunction with this project, but could also be used as brief introduction to these tools in any other content area. This is why it should be regarded as an internet workshop; the latter purpose is obviously more general and important. The purpose of the video is to enable the students to use and become familiar with these tools. As soon as they have become comfortable with using the tools, they may be able to transfer all of their skills to other activities.

  With all the sufficient preparation above, we constructed our multiliteracy project and correlated it to the math topic, percentages. The inquiry and workshop are essential parts in this project because they are related to the criteria of knowledge, application, and communication and in order to incorporate the thinking criteria, we put a long run activity into the consolidation. The students are supposed to conduct their own Water Footprint and in this activity they will play the roles of experimentalists in a scientific community. Not only do they need to keep a successive record (which is a daily routine of experiments), but they also need to think and reflect about some of the more pressing environmental issues based upon their percentage data and related knowledge.