Summer Mathematics Adventure #1 - Farmer's Market
Take your kids to a farmer's market, so they can get practice handling money and making transactions. Do not bring calculators! This is mental math at its best and most real.
For the littlest kids, work with items that are sold in whole dollar amounts and have a raft of $1 bills with you. They can hold the money, count out what they have, decide if it's enough to make a purchase, and then make the trade.
For slightly older kids, go with a budget, say $20, and have the kids figure out how much they can buy with that $20, make the transactions, determine if they have the right amount of change and how much they have left to spend.
Older kids can manage more complex dollars and cents transactions. For example, today we bought 2 1/2 pounds of oranges for $1.50 per pound. The clerk ran through the calculation quickly in his head, and the girls and I talked about how to do that mentally on the way home. If we had bought 1 lb of oranges, how much would that have cost? If we had bought 2 lb of oranges, how much would that have cost? So, we actually bought 2 1/2 pounds of oranges, so what were we supposed to pay?
Doing the thinking out loud is a great way to get comfortable with mental math.
Take your kids to a farmer's market, so they can get practice handling money and making transactions. Do not bring calculators! This is mental math at its best and most real.
For the littlest kids, work with items that are sold in whole dollar amounts and have a raft of $1 bills with you. They can hold the money, count out what they have, decide if it's enough to make a purchase, and then make the trade.
For slightly older kids, go with a budget, say $20, and have the kids figure out how much they can buy with that $20, make the transactions, determine if they have the right amount of change and how much they have left to spend.
Older kids can manage more complex dollars and cents transactions. For example, today we bought 2 1/2 pounds of oranges for $1.50 per pound. The clerk ran through the calculation quickly in his head, and the girls and I talked about how to do that mentally on the way home. If we had bought 1 lb of oranges, how much would that have cost? If we had bought 2 lb of oranges, how much would that have cost? So, we actually bought 2 1/2 pounds of oranges, so what were we supposed to pay?
Doing the thinking out loud is a great way to get comfortable with mental math.