Celebrating Harmony Week: Everyone belongs

This lesson is an ideal opportunity to celebrate Harmony Week. Harmony Week is a time to celebrate Australian multiculturalism and the successful integration of migrants into our community. The central message is "Everyone Belongs," fostering inclusiveness, respect, and a sense of belonging for all Australians, regardless of cultural or linguistic background.

Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Global guesswork

40 minutes

Find Out: Building our village ratios

30 minutes

Take Action: Presenting our global snapshot

Learning intentions

We are learning to use mathematical modelling, ratios, and direct proportion to represent global data on a smaller scale.
We are learning to interpret statistical representations and recognise the approximate nature of measurements in data modelling.

Success criteria

I can accurately convert global statistics into proportions suitable for a 'village of 100' model.
I can formulate problems involving scale and ratio, and explain the implications of rounding when representing real-world data.

Learning activities

🌍 Making it matter

Use imagination and story to warm up abstract knowledge and make the curriculum matter.

Good morning, esteemed delegates. As you know, Harmony Week is approaching, a time for celebrating Australia's rich cultural diversity and promoting inclusiveness. This year, the national organising committee wants to launch a new, powerful campaign to help young people truly grasp the incredible tapestry of our world.

They've commissioned your team, the Global Insights Bureau, to create a compelling, easy-to-understand representation of global diversity. They specifically want to visualise the world as if it were a village of just 100 people. Your challenge is to take vast, complex global statistics – on language, religion, resource access, and more – and distil them into these 100 individuals.

This isn't just about crunching numbers; it's about making the data resonate, making it human. Your models will be used in schools across the country to inspire understanding and empathy. But here's the catch: the statistics are enormous, and representing them accurately in such a small sample requires precision, thoughtful rounding, and an an understanding of how approximations can shape perception. The committee needs your findings to be not only mathematically sound but also insightful. We need to avoid misrepresentation. The future of this Harmony Week initiative depends on your clear, accurate, and impactful work.

🎯 Why this matters

This narrative creates a "need to know" by positioning students as crucial data analysts responsible for accurately and sensitively communicating global diversity, directly linking to the need to use mathematical modelling, rates, ratio, and scale (AC9M9M05) and to recognise that all measurements are estimates (AC9M9M04).

💡 Tune In: Global guesswork

Step 1

Explain that Harmony Week is about understanding global diversity. Tell students they will consider the world as a village of 100 people.

Step 2

Present a series of global statistics categories (e.g., "What percentage of the world speaks English as a first language?", "What percentage of the world lives on less than $2.15 USD a day?", "What percentage of the world has access to the internet?"). For each category, ask students to write down their best guess for how many people in a village of 100 would fit that description. Emphasise that there are no wrong answers at this stage, just predictions.

Step 3

After each question, ask for a show of hands for different ranges (e.g., "Who thinks it's 1-10 people?", "11-20 people?"). Briefly discuss the variation in predictions.

Step 4

Conclude by stating that their predictions highlight how difficult it is to conceptualise global data without clear models, setting the stage for accurately calculating these proportions.

🔍 Find Out: Building our village ratios

Step 1

Introduce the concept of using proportions and ratios to scale global data to a village of 100. Explain that if the world population is roughly 8 billion, and we are scaling to 100, then 1 person in our village represents 80 million people in the real world (8,000,000,000 / 100 = 80,000,000).

Step 2

Model the conversion process with a key global statistic. For example, "Around 12% of the world's population speaks Mandarin Chinese as a first language." Demonstrate how to calculate this for a village of 100: 12% of 100 = 12 people.

Step 3

Provide students with a curated list of global statistics. For Example, create a handout:

"Global Village Statistics" (Teacher to curate up-to-date figures from reputable sources like the UN, World Bank, Wikipedia's "List of Languages by Number of Native Speakers").

Example Data Points for Handout (Teachers should source current data):
- World Population: ~8 billion
- Languages: e.g., Mandarin (11.2%), Spanish (5.8%), English (4.6%), Hindi (4.5%), Bengali (3.3%)
- Religions: e.g., Christian (~32%), Muslim (~25%), Hindu (~15%), Buddhist (~7%), Folk Religions (~6%), Unaffiliated (~16%)
- Access to Sanitation: ~55% have safely managed sanitation.
- Access to Internet: ~66% use the internet.
- Literacy Rate (adults): ~87% are literate.
- Lives on < $2.15/day: ~9.2% (extreme poverty).
- Sex distribution: ~50.4% male, ~49.6% female.

Instruct them, in pairs or small groups, to convert each statistic into the equivalent number of people in a village of 100.

Emphasise the need to use direct proportion and carefully consider rounding to the nearest whole person, noting that this introduces an element of estimation (AC9M9M04).

Step 4

Circulate to provide support and clarification. Discuss with groups the implications of rounding and how it affects the accuracy of their model. Ask questions like, "If 0.7 people speak a certain language, how do you represent that? What does it mean for our model?"

Step 5

Worked example:

🌍 Global Percentages in a Village of 100

🟣 Problem 1

If approximately 32% of the world's population identifies as Christian, how many people in our village of 100 would be Christian?

Solution process:
• Identify the global percentage: 32%
• Apply this percentage to the village total: 32% of 100
• Calculate: 0.32 × 100 = 32

Result:
32 people in the village of 100 would identify as Christian.

🟢 Problem 2

If roughly 1.3% of the world's population speaks German as a first language, how many people in our village of 100 would speak German?

Solution process:
• Identify the global percentage: 1.3%
• Apply this percentage to the village total: 1.3% of 100
• Calculate: 0.013 × 100 = 1.3
• Consider rounding: We cannot have 0.3 of a person, so we round to the nearest whole number.

Result:
Approximately 1 person in the village of 100 would speak German.

💡 Discussion Point:
This model is an estimate. Small percentages may be rounded up or down, meaning some groups can appear slightly under- or over-represented in simplified models like “a village of 100.”

✨ Take Action: Presenting our global snapshot

Step 1

Instruct student groups to choose 3-5 of their calculated village of 100 statistics that they find most surprising or impactful.

Step 2

Challenge them to create a clear and concise visual presentation (e.g., a simple infographic, a set of illustrated cards, or a short digital slide) for each chosen statistic. Each presentation should include:

The global statistic.
The equivalent number of people in the village of 100.
A brief, written interpretation of what this means for global harmony and understanding.
A small note on the estimation involved due to rounding.

Step 3

Students will then share their selected "snapshots" with another group or the whole class, explaining their findings and how they formulated their representation. This activity develops communication skills and allows them to "report methods and findings" (AC9M9M05).

🌱 Story of Change: Harmony for humanity

Australian Red Cross promotes harmony by supporting vulnerable people and communities across Australia and globally, fostering understanding and respect through humanitarian programs. They advocate for cultural diversity and inclusion, ensuring everyone feels they belong.

Assessment opportunities

Observe students during the "Tune In" prediction activity for engagement and initial understanding.
Formative feedback during "Find Out" on calculations, use of proportion and ratio, and discussions around rounding and estimation.
Review "Take Action" presentations for accuracy of calculations, clarity of interpretation, and acknowledgment of estimation.
Collect student work from the "Find Out" activity for a quick check on their ability to convert statistics.

Differentiation

Support: Provide pre-calculated percentages for some statistics, allowing students to focus on the conversion to 100 and the interpretation. Offer a simplified template for the "Take Action" presentation. Pair students strategically to ensure peer support.
Extension: Challenge students to research additional global statistics of their choice and integrate them into their village model, justifying their data sources. Ask them to critically evaluate the limitations of the "village of 100" model in representing complex realities, explicitly linking to relative and percentage errors (AC9M9M04) in the simplification.
Extension (Literacy): Have students write a short reflective piece (100-150 words) on how transforming global data into the "village of 100" format changed their perception of world diversity and interdependence. They should specifically mention how ratios and proportions helped them understand the scale, and how estimation played a role in their model.

Where to next

Students could delve deeper into specific global issues highlighted by their statistics, exploring the causes and potential solutions. Mathematically, this lesson prepares students for more complex data analysis, statistical literacy, and advanced proportional reasoning problems, including those involving compounded rates or inverse proportion.

Key vocabulary

Proportion: A part, share, or number considered in comparative relation to a whole.
Ratio: The quantitative relation between two amounts showing the number of times one value contains or is contained within the other.
Scale: The relationship between a measurement on a model or map and the corresponding measurement on the actual object or distance.
Estimate: An approximate calculation or judgement of the value, number, quantity, or extent of something.
Mathematical modelling: The process of using mathematics to represent, analyse, and solve real-world problems.
Harmony Week: A time to celebrate Australia’s cultural diversity and promote inclusiveness, respect, and belonging for everyone.

This lesson was created by Thea + CoolPlus AI

Harmony Ratios: Mapping Our Global Village

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Summary

Learning intentions

Success criteria

Lesson Guides and Printables

Lesson Details

Prior Knowledge

Skills Required

Curriculum Mapping

Resources Required

UN Sustainable Development Goals

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