Percentages Teaching Resources

Browse printable worksheets, Google slides activities and more for teaching percentages in the elementary math classroom.

Explore editable resources you can easily differentiate for individual learners plus math center activities and engaging games to help students understand how to calculate percentages, how to find the percentage of a number and more.

This collection of curriculum-aligned printable and digital resources has been created just for teachers by the teachers on the Teach Starter team. That means each resource has undergone an in-depth review before being published to ensure it's ready for the classroom and your students!

New to teaching this section of the math curriculum? Read on for a guide to all things fractions from our teacher team!

What Are Percentages? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Let's start with a definition of percentages you can share with your students!

Identified by the % sign, percentages are a way of expressing a number as a portion of 100. You can also think of percentages as a way of comparing things on a scale from 0 to 100. If something is 50 percent, for example, that means it's halfway between 0 percent (which means none) and 100 percent (which means all).

Picture a pizza. Now imagine it had 100 slices (hey, we can dream!).

If you and your friends ate 10 slices of pizza, you would have eaten 10% of the pizza! If you ate 50 slices, you would have 50% of the pizza left ... and maybe a bellyache.

How Do You Calculate Percentages?

To calculate a percentage, you need to divide the part (aka the value or quantity you want to find the percentage of) by the whole (aka the total value or quantity), and then multiply the result by 100.

To make things simpler for young math students, there's a formula for calculating a percentage:

percentage = (part / whole) x 100

Let's say you want to find out what percentage of 50 is 20. Using the formula, you would divide 20 by 50 and then multiply the result by 100, like this: