Year Eight Multiplicative Relationships Mini-pack

This mini-pack from the National Strategies contains materials focusing on developing students' understanding of proportionality. It includes an outline of three teaching phases and supporting resources, including supplementary notes, prompts for main activities and a problem bank. This Year Eight unit has been developed through a flexible use of the sample medium-term plans for mathematics.

Phase 1 (about four lessons)
• Addresses the need to move from additive to multiplicative thinking, introducing the idea of scaling numbers (including multiplicative inverses) and identifying proportional sets.
• Works with ‘difficult’ numbers (i.e. numbers that have a remainder when divided), forcing attention to the mathematical relationships and generalities involved.
• Emphasises fraction, decimal and percentage equivalents, treating the latter as a special kind of decimal (hundredths).

Phase 2 (one lesson)
• Involves identifying practical examples of proportions, leaving further extension to link with work on linear functions.

Phase 3 (about four lessons)
• Examines problems, mainly within the field of number, which are solved by multiplication or division, or a combination of the two operations.
• Highlights strategic approaches to problems by systematically examining the stages of a solution.
• Emphasises the use of calculators, seeking to automate the process of calculation, using the operational understanding developed in the first phase of the unit.

• URL: http://stem.org.uk/rx6vp