This activity is a great low floor, high ceiling hands-on math activity that takes zero prep and had all of my kids fully engaged. My 6th graders this year love to use their hands and build. So, to help them better understand ratios, I decided to bring out the manipulatives. First, I asked my students to find one or two partners, then in their groups select a collection of items from our manipulatives bins. I had tangrams, pattern blocks, beads, unifix cubes, cuisinaire rods, and place value blocks, but this could work with any manipulatives that you may have in your classroom. When they had their items, I asked them to find as many ratios they could to describe relationships between their items. For the collection above, they might find the following ratios. triangles to hexagons = 7:3 unifix cubes to beads = 5:20 green triangles to triangles = 4:7 yellow to red = 9:3 I gave my students about 15 minutes to find and record as many ratio relationships as they could, in ...