My Amazing Teaching Moment: 2015-2016
Narrative of Amazing Teaching Moment: Shopping Spree
This learning activity was designed to get students thinking like smart, savvy consumers. As a culminating project for our ratios and percentages unit, this performance task challenged students to compare regular prices to sale prices in order to determine percentage discount, to decide whether or not the sale was actually a good one. Students often think in absolute dollar amounts and get excited when they hear that something is discounted “X dollars,” so this task forced them to consider the bigger picture and to think about the relative savings when looking at product prices.
Learning objective: to calculate percent savings by comparing sale prices to regular prices
Guiding Question: As consumers, we need to be thoughtful about sales. How can we be sure we are getting the most for our money?
Activity: Working in teams of two, students went on a “shopping spree” with the goal of finding the best deals on sale items as listed in weekly advertisements. They were given a specific budget and partners “shopped” at five different stores(via the flyers) with a competitive twist -- they had only 10 minutes at each station in order to find the best value for their money, or the greatest percentage savings.
The competitive aspect was particularly engaging, as partnerships were motivated to “win,” and students later presented their findings to the class, comparing their “deals” and seeing who was able to get the most for their money.
When students finished, they reflected and answered the following questions: Which types of goods offered the greatest percent savings, and why do you think this was the case? Which types of goods offered the least percent savings, and why that you think this was the case? These questions pushed their thinking beyond mathematics skills into real world problem solving.
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