Food service professionals: Working with fractions
This lesson for grade six demonstrates how an understanding of fractions is important in the food service industry. Students will use operations with fractions to determine how many recipes to make for a given scenario.
An activity for grade 6 Mathematics
Provided by CareerStart
Learning outcomes
- Students will use fractions and customary measurements to alter recipes to serve large numbers of people.
- Students will use operations with decimals to determine profit from a catering job.
Teacher planning
Materials needed
- Student handouts:
- Advanced students: “A Catered Affair” catering problem and recipes (gingerbread and punch)
- Regular students: “Apple Pan Dowdy: How Many Recipes?” problem
- Teacher resources:
- Discussion questions
- Answer key for Apple Pan Dowdy problem
- Chart paper and markers for each group
Time required for lesson
Two days in class:
- Day 1 — Whole group discussion and cooperative group work
- Day 2 — Groups present solutions, answer questions, and compare solutions.
Procedure
- Using the discussion questions, conduct a class discussion about the food service industry.
- Put students into groups of four and hand out problems to the groups — “A Catered Affair” for advanced students and “Apple Pan Dowdy: How Many Recipes?” for regular students. Give the students class time to complete the problems, and have each group create a poster that shows its solution to the problem.
- The following day in class, have the groups present their solutions to the rest of the class.
- Close by having the class compare the different solutions.
North Carolina Curriculum Alignment
Mathematics (2004)
Grade 6
- Goal 1: Number and Operations - The learner will understand and compute with rational numbers.
- Objective 1.04: Develop fluency in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of non-negative rational numbers.
- Analyze computational strategies.
- Describe the effect of operations on size.
- Estimate the results of computations.
- Judge the reasonableness of solutions.
- Objective 1.04: Develop fluency in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of non-negative rational numbers.
