Proportional Relationships Teaching Resources

Explore proportional relationships in your math classes this school year with time-saving worksheets, Google Slides templates and more teacher-created resources for your lesson plans.

Aligned with both TEKS and the Common Core math curriculum, the printable and digital resources in this collection have all undergone a careful review by a member of our math teacher team to ensure they're ready for your lesson plans and your students! Explore fun games, word problems and more to help students understand unit rates and build their rate language vocabulary.

Is this your first year teaching about proportional relationships in math? Or maybe you're just looking for a handy refresher guide? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including a simple definition you can use to help introduce this concept to your class!

What Does Proportional Mean? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Let's start with a proportional definition that you can use to help explain what this math concept means to your students.

When things are proportional, it means that they are equivalent to one another in size or amount. We can use proportions in math to help understand how different items relate to one another or how parts of something relate to the whole.

What Is a Proportional Relationship? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Taking the explanation of what the word proportional means from above, it now becomes easier to explain what a proportional relationship is.

Here's a definition you can use with your students:

A proportional relationship is the name for the relationship between two quantities. When two things have a proportional relationship, they will always increase or decrease by the same constant of proportionality.

For example, if we have two ratios that are equivalent to each other, we can say they're proportional. If we take a look at the ratios (written as fractions) 4/10 and 16/40, the numerator and denominator of the first ratio are both multiplied by 4 to equal the second ratio.