Concept of rate; line graphs - Teaching Presentation - Year 5

This presentation provides four days of teaching that cover the objectives:

• Solve problems involving rate.
• Draw and interpret line graphs and read intermediate points.

It includes starter activities, whole class teaching, group activities, practice sheets and mastery questions. It can be used on a variety of interactive whiteboards.

Day 1 Teaching
Children measure their heart rates in beats per minute. Once everyone has located their pulse, start an Interactive Whiteboard timer while children count the number of beats in 30 seconds. Use this to discuss the concept of ‘rate’ (an amount of something that happens in a given unit of time). Discuss other examples of rate, e.g. rate of growth, rate of pay, speed.

Day 2 Teaching
Show children a bar line chart of temperatures (resources). Explain how we can join the tops of each bar to create a line graph. Do this, then ask questions about intermediate points on the line graph. Note how it is good for representing changes over time, how it ‘tells a story’.

Day 3 Teaching
Use a skydiver’s record-breaking free-fall as a context for measuring the rate of fall of temperature with height. Temperature falls at a constant rate as you ascend above the earth. Work together to draw a line graph to represent this. Ask questions about other heights, using familiar points of reference, e.g. the top of Mount Everest at about 8.8km.

Day 4 Teaching
Discuss the idea that many things, like tablet computers, fall in price as they get older (they depreciate). Look at a table showing the rates of depreciation of a cheap tablet and an expensive tablet. Interpret the table to recognise that rates of depreciation are different.

This teaching is part of Hamilton’s Year 5 Measures and Data block. Each Hamilton maths block contains a complete set of planning and resources to teach a term’s worth of objectives for one of the National Curriculum for England’s maths areas.