Year 6 Fractions, Decimals and Percentages: Term 4 Maths That Gets Students Ready for Year 7

By the second-last week of Term 3, most Year 6 classrooms have finished the heavy number work and are looking at a Term 4 that is crowded with orientation days, swimming carnivals, graduation rehearsals and report writing. It is tempting to let maths drift into revision worksheets. This unit is a better use of the time.

Fractions, decimals and percentages are the single most assumed piece of prior knowledge in Year 7 maths. Secondary teachers start ratio, rates and financial maths in the first weeks of the year on the basis that students can already move between ¹⁄₄, 0.25 and 25% without thinking. Students who can't spend Year 7 catching up while the class moves on.

The two Australian Curriculum v9 content descriptions this unit targets are also unusually concrete for Year 6 maths:

• AC9M6N07 — solve problems that require finding a familiar fraction, decimal or percentage of a quantity, including percentage discounts, choosing efficient calculation strategies and using digital tools where appropriate.
• AC9M6N08 — approximate numerical solutions to problems involving rational numbers and percentages, including financial contexts, using appropriate estimation strategies.

Read them together and the unit almost writes itself: percentage discounts, financial contexts, estimation before calculation. That is shopping, pocket money, sale prices and splitting a bill — the maths students will actually use over the summer holidays.

This is built for roughly nine lessons, so it survives losing a couple to orientation days. Each week has a clear question students can answer by the end of it.

Week 1 — "Which is bigger?" (converting and comparing)

Re-establish the three representations as one idea. Start with the benchmark set every student should own cold: halves, quarters, tenths, fifths and their decimal and percentage twins. Use a hundred-square or a metre ruler rather than a conversion table — the goal is that 0.3, ³⁄₁₀ and 30% are recognised as the same amount, not looked up. Finish the week with ordering tasks that mix all three forms on one number line.

Week 2 — "What's the sale price?" (AC9M6N07)

Percentage of a quantity, taught through discounts. Teach the mental route first: 10% is divide by ten, 5% is half of that, 25% is a quarter, 50% is a half, and everything else is built from those. Students should be able to find 15% of $80 and 30% of $150 without a calculator before they are allowed one. Then flip it: "the sale price is $45 after 25% off — what was it originally?"

Week 3 — "Roughly how much?" (AC9M6N08)

Estimation in financial contexts. This is the week most units skip and the one Year 7 teachers most wish had been taught. Give students a supermarket receipt with the total covered, a group dinner bill to split five ways, or a phone plan comparison, and require an estimate with a stated strategy before any calculation. "I rounded $47.85 to $50 and took 10% off" is the sentence you are looking for.

Everything below is in the Year 5–6 maths collection on this site. The list is deliberately short — one solid resource per purpose beats a folder of twenty.

Week 1: converting and comparing

• White Rose Maths — Year 6 Fractions (White Rose Education). Free downloadable worksheets with worked examples; the "fractions to decimals" and "decimals to percentages" small steps map directly onto Week 1.
• Khan Academy — Year 6 Fractions and Decimals (Khan Academy). Short videos for students who need to hear it a second time at home; note it uses US "6th grade" labelling.
• Mathspace AU — Year 5–6 Decimals and Percentages (Mathspace AU). Australian-curriculum sequenced practice with instant feedback; useful as a differentiated task for the students who are already there.

Week 2: percentage of a quantity

• Transum — Percentages of Amounts (Transum Mathematics). Self-marking online drill with levels that move from 10% and 50% through to 17.5%; ideal as a five-minute starter every day of Week 2.
• Khan Academy — Ratios, Rates and Percentages (Khan Academy). The "percent word problems" set is the closest match to the discount and sale-price problems in AC9M6N07.
• Maths is Fun — Finding a Percentage (Maths is Fun). A one-page explainer with an interactive slider that many students prefer to a textbook definition.

Week 3: estimating in financial contexts

• Corbett Maths — Percentages (Corbett Maths). The "percentages of amounts (non-calculator)" video and practice questions are pitched a touch above Year 6, which makes them the right extension for Week 3.
• Real receipts, catalogues and menus. Nothing on the internet beats a photo of last night's takeaway order with the total blacked out.

For worksheets across the whole strand, the worksheet collection can be filtered to Year 5–6 maths, and the percentage search surfaces the interactive practice sets not listed above.

These come up in almost every Year 6 class and are worth teaching into rather than waiting to correct.

1. "Percent means out of 100 things." Students who learnt percentages on a hundred-square can struggle to find 25% of 8 because "there aren't 100 of them". Use quantities that are not 100 from the first lesson — 50% of 8, 25% of 20, 10% of 60.
2. Decimal place-value slips when converting. 0.5 becomes 5% and 0.05 becomes 50%. A metre ruler fixes this faster than any rule: 0.5 m is halfway, and halfway is 50%.
3. Calculator first, thinking never. If the calculator is available from the start, students never build the mental routes AC9M6N08 asks for. Hold it back until Week 2 and require an estimate before every calculator answer in Week 3.
4. Reversing the discount. "20% off $50 is $40, so 20% off $40 is $50" is a very common Year 6 belief. The "what was the original price?" problems in Week 2 exist to surface it.

Support. Restrict the benchmark set to halves, quarters, tenths and 50%, 25%, 10%. Keep quantities to multiples of 10 and 4. The Mathspace and Transum tasks above both have entry levels that do exactly this.

Extension. Percentage increase and decrease ("the price went up 15% — what is it now?"), successive discounts ("20% off, then a further 10% off — is that 30% off?"), and reverse problems. The Corbett Maths set covers all three.

Assessment. A single-page task in the last week: one catalogue page with four items, four questions. (1) Convert each discount to a fraction and a decimal. (2) Find the sale price of two items without a calculator, showing the mental route. (3) Estimate the total for all four, stating the rounding used, then calculate. (4) One reverse problem. That is AC9M6N07 and AC9M6N08 on one sheet, and it doubles as report-writing evidence for Semester 2.

If your school runs a formal Year 6 into Year 7 transition unit, this task travels well — several secondary schools ask feeder schools for exactly this kind of sample.

Once the class is fluent, the natural next stop is ratio and rates, which Year 7 teachers begin in Term 1. The Year 7–8 maths collection has the introductory material if you have students who are ready early. For the rest of the Term 4 planning picture, our blog has term-by-term guides across maths, English and science.

This guide was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Australian School Resources team. Curriculum codes were checked against ACARA v9 and NESA syllabus documents at time of writing.