Restaurant Math Project

It’s hard to believe the end of the school year is less than a month away now. This time of year is always met with a mix of feelings, from exhaustion and burnout to excitement and pride. I have the pleasure of teaching the oldest bunch of kids at my school so it always feels doubly emotional. It’s going to be difficult to say goodbye to this group in particular because they’re such a small class and we’ve gotten very close throughout the school year… It’s how I imagine a parent feels when they wake up and realize their baby is all grown up. Kind of.

Anyway, I wanted to end the year with a fun math project, but wasn’t struck with any bright ideas. I searched all of my favorite teaching blogs, pinterest, and even google, but nothing stood out. Eventually I came across this cool restaurant math activity that was a bit below my students’ abilities, but still helpful for introducing real-life math. Doing this activity with my students gave me the idea to have them design their own “restaurants” complete with menus, pricing, and even a 3D design in Google Sketch-up. The kids are SUPER excited about this because they love all things food related.

The project starts with a proposal to me about which type of restaurant they’d like to open (coffee shop, deli, pizza parlor, taco stand, etc.). Once approved, they have to put together some delicious menu items with descriptive language and appropriate pricing. Now, we’re in Vietnam so I let them choose which currency they’d like to use, but this is easily adaptable for any location. In fact, for an added challenge, you could tell students where their restaurant location is and have them work with currency conversions to complete this project. Later, after the menu and pricing is set, the students will make a corresponding worksheet with word problems that relate to their menu. Each student will need to submit 10 problems (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, discounts/percentages, rounding, and estimation) that classmates will have to solve. Finally, each student will bring in one menu item and a printed copy of their menu to share with the class. This will be our final party of the year, and one that I hope they remember for a long time.

Here’s the slideshow that I made with the project guideline if you’d like to use this as a model in your class. Happy Monday to all my stateside friends!

Here's another helpful site for more restaurant math!

Squares and Square Roots- Math Journal

This week we’re starting our math unit on squares and square roots and believe it or not, not everyone is excited about it… This can be an extremely difficult concept for some students to grasp because there’s a tendency to want to just multiply the exponent. I remember some of my students struggling with these last year so I thought I’d nip it in the bud with a fun math journal activity.

After a brief overview of what squares and square roots are and how to find them, I passed out this worksheet I made for them to create squares and see visually how they can be expressed. The idea is that all squares have equal sides, right? That means if you are using a grid, you can make different-sized squares pretty easily without needing a ruler, and learn your squares accidently in the process. This really seemed to help my kiddos grasp the concepts we talked about in class.

 

I have attached a copy of the worksheet here if you want to use it in your class as a task board or supplemental activity. Hope they enjoy it!   

Cha-Ching! 100 days

Love it or hate it, money makes the world go ‘round. Well, not exactly- that’s physics, but there’s no denying its importance in today’s modern world. Building numeracy skills using money is a great way to get your kids excited about math. Plus, it gives you a reason to clean out your car’s cup-holders and all that loose change that accumulates on top of your washer from cleaning out pockets before throwing a load in. Ok, maybe that’s just me…

With our school’s 100^th day quickly approaching, I’ve been scouring the internets and racking my brain trying to come up with fun learning activities for the big day. Although there are zillions of ideas out there, many of them are far too easy for my students. But this one was the perfect 100^th day math activity I’ve been searching for- “How many ways can you make a dollar?” This is a good one for our class because the math books we use are made in Hong Kong so all the word problems deal in HKD, while our national currency in Vietnam is the VND with mostly notes and really high values. They don’t often get the chance to work with US coins and bills, so they were doubly interested.

 

For this activity, I brought in a bunch of loose change that I had in my stash from the states and made this corresponding worksheet for them to log their answers. Here’s a copy of the worksheet if you want to do this in your class. Enjoy!

Math Board Game Project

We are wrapping up our first semester here before the big Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday next week and I wanted to give my students a fun project that would help them review for the final exam. We love board games in my class, so any chance to integrate them into our learning, I’m all for. This is what I like to call “hiding vegetables in the lasagna” because it’s chock full of math, but it’s in the form of a fun board game- genius. Plus, who doesn’t love playing board games? J Anyway, this project was such a success last year that I thought I’d do it again. Here’s how we did it:

Each student group is responsible for creating a fun, challenging, and creative board game. This includes writing the game rules and objectives, creating question cards along with some form of an answer key, and making the actual game board. Class time and resources are available for them to complete this task, and when it’s finished, each group presents their game to the class. Once each group has presented their game, we take turns playing each of them during math or at task board time and then we take a little vote on which group had the best game. I give a little extra prize for the class favorite, but each group is graded according to the rubric for their own game. Here’s a copy of the project guidelines and rubric that I created if you want to try it out with your students… Enjoy!

 

What other math projects have you tried?

  

Candy Averages

What a busy week it’s been already! We’ve jumped right in after break and I did a really fun math lesson, so I thought I’d share.

We’ve started our unit on averages, and to bribe ease the kids back into the swing of things, we did candy math! Ok, so this is SO not part of the New Year’s resolution, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, right? This is such a fun lesson, but it can be a costly one if you’ve got a big class. Keep in mind that you can adapt this one into group or partner work to cut back on the cost though. Here’s how it works:

1)     Pass out a data collection sheet to each student (or student group). Click here to snag a copy of the one that I made for this lesson.

2)     Get a small bag of M&M’s for each student (or student group) and tell them to estimate how many candies are in the bag before touching or opening them.

3)     Of their estimated total, have them then guess how many of each color will be found in their bag.

4)     Once all estimations are made, have the students open their bags and record the actual amounts.

5)     Then, have them review their percentage and graphing skills to put their data into a pie chart and/or bar graph.

6)     Lastly, enjoy a tasty treat… even if math is at 8am, you won’t hear any complaints.

I will snap a picture of the bar graphs that we created in our math journals with this data and post it later. Until then, happy humpday!

More math fun!

 

If you’re like me then you’re always looking for ways to fun up a math lesson for your kids. Unfortunately, students often feel intimidated or overwhelmed with challenging math concepts. It’s not uncommon for my students to zone out, get distracted, or even shut down completely during math and the funny thing is that I was the exact same way with math when I was growing up. I loathed sitting in math class and I dreaded being called on for fear of having the wrong answer. These days, it’s one of my absolute favorite subjects to teach because unlike so many other subjects, there are definitive answers. There’s something to be said for the formulaic, systematic, black and white side of life. So many things need interpretation and are subjective that it’s nice to teach with the left-brain throughout the day. I digress.

Anyway, so I’m constantly perusing Pinterest and other wonderful blogs for ways to bring life and fun into math and here are a couple of the things I’ve found that I’ve been using for task board just to reinforce some of the more difficult concepts we’ve been learning:

Math Jenga  

I’m sure most of you have played Jenga in day and guess what? It’s still fun even after all of these years! This game is not the quietest of activities, but it’s great for those task boards where you can play some music and have a little fun. All you need for this station is a Jenga set and some math problem cards. Now, there’s a couple ways to do this; a) you can tape the problems onto the blocks or b) you can have them draw a card for every block they successfully remove/replace. Here’s a picture for reference and I’ve attached my decimal division strips below if you want to use them. Enjoy!

Math Jenga- Dividing Decimals

Math Memory

Who doesn’t love a good game of memory, right? Ok, I have to admit that this one isn’t the fan favorite in class, but it beats me droning on at the front of the board for an hour. If you asked my kids, they’d say just about anything beats thatJ

For this one, I simply created a table in a word document where I imported problems and answers (in different boxes, of course), printed it out, then put a colored piece of cardstock behind it before laminating and BAM- you’re done. I generally use a different colored cardstock for each concept so they don’t get all mixed up together. I’ve made a couple of sets so far and they’re a really great review before a test. Feel free to snag the template below or leave a comment if you’ve got an easier way of doing it. Thanks and have a lovely night.

Decimal-Fraction Memory Cards

Decimal-Percentage Memory Cards

 

Geometry, Shapes and Nets, Oh My!

We’ve been studying the basics of geometry over the past week and doing some fun activities with 3D shapes and nets. Unlike other areas of math, working with shapes and nets are generally seen as more fun by most younger students, especially when you get to draw and build things during math time… and that’s exactly what we’ve been up to. If you’re looking for a creative way to jazz up geometry in the classroom, here are a few ideas.

Activity 1- Building prisms and pyramids

I got this idea while I was looking through our Hong Kong math book a few weeks back preparing for the first unit of geometry. I was looking for something that was hands-on and that allowed my students to practice and create the 3D shapes we’d just learned. This one’s great for the kinesthetic learners in the classroom, but fun enough to engage all the students.

Divide your students into small groups or let them work independently if you have enough supplies for each student. Give them a small ball of clay (about the size of a bouncy ball) and a handful of toothpicks and tell them to build basic 3D shapes. What I did was have them build the shapes then draw and label them in their math journals so they could refer back to them in the future. Another extension could be to list the number of edges, vertices and faces of the shapes. I would be willing to bet that this little activity has helped my students remember the vocabulary more than any other that we’ve done in this unit and it was fun. What a bonus!

 

Activity 2- Isometric Sketching

This year I’ve been trying to do as much journaling as possible with my kids because it’s such a great tool for enhancing learning. I just love the outside-the-box thinking that happens when you do a journal activity for math. This week, one of our journal activities was to use isometric dot paper to create something in 3D. I let them draw whatever they wanted on the dot paper and then asked them to write a short description explaining what they made and what shapes they used to create it. I was pretty impressed with the results. Just google “Isometric Dot Paper”, copy & paste it into a Word document, resize it and you’re good to go. Here’s a couple of pics of what ours look like.

 

 

Activity 3- 3D Shape Mobile

  Ok, so I totally used this as our art project for last week, but it could easily fit into a math lesson. I printed out a bunch of nets of 3D shapes here then we colored them, cut them out and made a pretty hanging mobile for our classroom. What I loved most about this activity is that it took little to no preparation on my part and the kids enjoyed it. I’d say it was a win-win. I’ll be sure to snap a picture of our finished product tomorrow. Until then, I hope you’re having a great week!

 

Treasure Island: A multi-purpose board game

Are you looking for a fun math station activity for task board time? Need an engaging way to help your kids review for an exam? Look no further; Treasure Island is the answer. It’s a board game that I made a couple of weeks ago to help my kids practice and review dividing decimals before their big test, but could easily be adapted for any subject. I drew the game board on a large piece of cardstock and printed out some pirate clipart from the internet to decorate it. Then, I created a table with leveled question cards in MS Word, printed them on different colored paper, and laminated them. I printed one extra sheet so the kids playing the game during task board time could show their work and sign the questions that they completed. I put the laminated question cards, player pieces, and dice in a small plastic baggie with game instructions in the math activity bin so it’s easy for the kids to just grab it and get to work. I will be adding different question cards before each big math test just to mix it up, but they really seemed to like it. Here are a couple of pictures of the board and the MS Word document that I created for the question cards. Enjoy!

 

Treasure Island Question Cards