Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes – Part A: Practical Percentages
10 minutes – Part B: Part to Whole
30 minutes – Part C: Researching Sugar Content

Part A: Practical Percentages

In this first part, we warm students up to the idea of daily intake with some easy percentage work. The key here is using relevant, interesting products, so that students can think through the nuts and bolts of what daily intake actually looks like for them.

Currently, food products do not distinguish between natural and added sugars on their packaging. For this reason, we recommend you focus on foods that are unlikely to have any natural sugars. For instance, we might expect yoghurt or other dairy products to have some natural sugars, but it would be unlikely to find as much in biscuits or lollies. By choosing foods that probably only have added sugars, you can treat the total sugars listed on the packaging as representing added sugar. For more on the distinction between added and natural sugars, check out this post from our friends at SugarByHalf.

Step 1.

Remind students that the recommended daily intake of added sugar is 25g, or 6 teaspoons.

Step 2.

Present some products in terms of their sugar content, phrased as a percentage of daily intake, and ask students to figure out how many servings would make up 100% of that intake. You will need to do some research here, although we can make some suggestions for different figures.

For instance, you might find a bag of lollies with 12.5g of sugar per 100g serving. You could then tell students that 100g of those lollies contains 50% of your daily sugar intake, and then ask how many lollies would make up 100% of a daily sugar intake.

As much as possible in this early section, try to use simple percentages that sum easily to 100%. You might want to adjust some of the values slightly to make the numbers easier - for instance, you probably won’t find lollies with exactly 12.5g of sugar per 100g, but you might find something proximal - 12.3g, say, or 12.7g. These rough approximations will be okay for this early stage.

You might also want to use foods or drinks that clearly exceed the 100% sugar limit, and ask students to adjust the amount to get it back within appropriate limits. For instance, some soft drink might have 50g of sugar per serving. You can present this figure as 200% of the recommended daily intake, and ask students how much of a serving would make up 100%.

Part B: Part to Whole

Once students are comfortable adjusting basic percentages up and down, this section moves towards more complex math.

Step 1.

Set up four or five different products, each with a different percentage of sugar. Continue to provide the amounts as percentages, although you might also want to provide the amount in grams alongside, so that students can start to think about the conversion from grams to percentages.

We will provide an example set of percentages below, along with some suggestions about the types of questions you might like to ask. You are welcome to use the example set directly, or to adapt it with whatever specific products or percentages you wish to focus on. We recommend using real products where possible, to make the learning less abstract for students.

Chocolate biscuits, 100g -> 12.5g of sugar, 50% of recommended daily sugar intake
Muesli bar, 35g -> 5g of sugar, 20% of recommended daily sugar intake
Breakfast cereal 1, 50g -> 3.75g of sugar, 15% of recommended daily sugar intake
Breakfast cereal 2, 50g -> 4.38g of sugar, 17.5% of recommended daily sugar intake

Step 2.

Start this exercise by asking students to make up a menu that adds up to 100% of the daily recommended sugar intake. In our example set, the simplest option might be two servings of biscuits, but students might also pick five muesli bars.

Step 3.

Next, give students a couple of questions where they are assigned an initial food, and must build the total to 100% from there. These questions can be easier or harder depending on your class - for instance, it would be quite easy to give students one muesli bar, with 20% of the daily sugar intake, and ask them to make the menu up to 100%. Harder options could include multiple foods (for instance, one muesli bar and one serve of the first breakfast cereal), or foods with harder starting percentages (the second breakfast cereal). We have offered some potential starting options below, along with some possible solutions.

2 x muesli bar (20% each)
Total = 40%
To get to 100%, add four serves of breakfast cereal 1 (4 x 15% = 60%).

1 x biscuits (50%), 1 x muesli bar (20%)
Total = 70%
To get to 100%, add two serves of breakfast cereal 1 (2 x 15% = 30%).

1 x breakfast cereal 2 (17.5%), 1 x muesli bar (20%)
Total = 37.5%
To get to 100%, add one serve of breakfast cereal 2, and three serves of breakfast cereal 1 (1 x 17.5 + 3 x 15% = 62.5%).

You could easily modify any of these options by moving around the starting and solution foods. If one serve of biscuits, a muesli bar, and two serves of breakfast cereal 1 sum 100%, it doesn’t matter which ones are given as starting options and which ones belong to the solution - it just depends on how difficult or easy you want the question to be.

Part C: Researching Sugar Content

In this section, students will learn how to translate sugar content into a percentage, as measured against the daily recommended intake. They will then use this knowledge to research a string of products and compare the amounts of sugar in different products.

Step 1.

Begin by demonstrating the equation to turn the amount of sugar in a product into a percentage. We recommend using one of the products from the previous part of the lesson, so that students are already familiar with what the outcome ought to be and can now see how you got there in the first place.

To get the percentage, divide the amount of sugar in the product by the 25g limit and multiply by 100.

EG: The biscuits in our example set average 12.5g of sugar per 100g serving.

12.5 ÷ 25 = 0.5
0.5 x 100 = 50
12.5 is 50% of 25

Step 2.

Ask students to choose and research products from the supermarket. They might explore products via packaging that they have collected, or they could research products online. We recommend the websites of major supermarket chains, which often list the Nutrition Information Panel (NIP) online.

Students should look to figure out the percentage of daily recommended sugar in each product.

Note: As before, the NIP does not currently distinguish between natural and added sugars. For the sake of simplicity, we will focus on total sugars here. However, if you would like to keep things as accurate as possible, consider directing students particularly towards junk food or food that is unlikely to have many natural sugars.

Step 3.

Once students have listed a string of different products (ideally about five), ask them to translate the sugar content of each into a percentage of the recommended daily sugar intake, drawing on the formula that you demonstrated before.

Step 4.

Using these percentages, you can then ask students to complete the series of questions and tasks listed below. The list essentially repeats the key steps that we have already gone through in the lesson, but with products that the students have researched themselves, and most probably with more complicated numbers, depending on the products students have chosen. You may wish to add or adapt questions to suit your class, or to develop the percentages work further.

For each product, what quantity would you need to eat to reach 100% of your recommended sugar intake?
- Depending on the confidence of your class, you might require them to reach 100% exactly, using fractions or partial serves, or you might ask them to find the closest whole number of serves.
If we started with a food that had X% of our recommended daily sugar intake, what combination of your products could you add to make 100%?
- In choosing your products here, you can work with products from the previous part of this question, or you could ask students to volunteer one of their own products.
- You can also repeat variations on this question with increasing complexity to help students practise the relevant math.

Step 5.

In closing the lesson, encourage students to reflect on their findings. Were they surprised by the amount of food that made up 100% of their recommended daily sugar intake? Was it more or less than they expected? Did some foods seem healthier than others? What could they do in future to make sure they’re eating within the recommended limits? If you have completed our earlier lesson on portion sizes (here), reintroduce some of the learning from that lesson - for instance, you might like to revisit how the recommended serving size does not always reflect what people put on their plate.

Differentiated Learning

Extension -

As an extension, you may like to ask students to work to a budget. They can use supermarket catalogues or websites to work out the prices of the suggested food items in their meal plan to determine how much their meals would cost them and whether they fit in with their budgets. They can then make adjustments to their meals according to the cost of their current menus.

Teacher Reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching:

What did you learn about your teaching today?
What worked well?
What didn't work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

SugarByHalf - Multiplication and Menus

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