Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! This week, TPT is throwing its annual Teacher Appreciation site-wide sale. With code THANKYOU24 at checkout, you'll get 25% off everything in my store.  How it works on TPT: My TPT store will be set to 20% off Tuesday-Wednesday May 7-8, 2024. With code THANKYOU24 at checkout, you will get an extra 5% off courtesy of TPT. Get 25% off classroom math word walls, digital math escape rooms, "2 truths and a lie" math error analysis activities, consumer math activities, middle school math activities, and everything else. How it works on my site: My website i ..read more

There are a lot of hidden costs to owning a car, costs that students may not think about when they are dreaming of driving themselves around. In this buy a car project, students learn about the costs associated with buying and owning a car so that they can be prepared when the time comes to buy their own car.  To start, students choose a car from the 6 car choices. Each car comes with stats: purchase cost, gas mileage, gas tank size, annual insurance premium and deductible.  Students then choose a bank loan. There are 4 loans to choose from. Each lo ..read more

I had been considering making a meatloaf, so looked up a recipe online that called for 2 pounds of ground meat. Because it would be my first meatloaf, and because I only have 1 pound of ground beef in the refrigerator, I started mentally halving all of the ingredients to get a feel for the recipe.  The recipe called for 3/4 of a cup of breadcrumbs, so I found myself mentally halving this fraction, then thinking about how I mentally halved the fraction, then wondering how others may mentally halve the fraction. So I took to Facebook to ask how others would do this: For such a s ..read more

Today is Pi Day so I wanted to share a couple digital activity ideas. Both also come in print, if you prefer having your students work on paper.  The first is a Pi Day digital math escape room for middle school where students find either the area or the circumference of a circle, given diameter or radius. Students calculate their answers then type the correct 4-letter code to move to the next puzzle.  The next is a Pi Day digital math escape room for older kids. In some of the problems, students are asked to find the diameter or radius, given circumference or area. The correct 4 ..read more

Knowing how to calculate the percentage of a number is pretty much the basis of consumer math. This skill comes up when calculating interest, tips at restaurants, discounts from coupons, tax on purchased items and with budgeting. It's such a simple but important skill for students to learn and really become comfortable with before graduation. I recently posted a cheat sheet on Facebook and got a comment about another cheat sheet I had shared some time ago in our consumer math Facebook group. It's a sheet showing students how to find a percentage of a number by dividing by 2 to find 50%, div ..read more

There's a 2-day sale happening this week on TPT and on my website. Everything in both stores is 25% off during the sale with code FEBSALE24 at checkout. During the sale, take 25% off: math word walls,  digital math escape rooms,  algebra activities,  algebra 2 activities, math pennants,  all bundles, and everything else.  How it works on TPT: My TPT store will be set to 20% off on Tuesday and Wednesday, February 6 and 7, 2024. With code FEBSALE24 at checkout, you will get an additional 5% off.  How it works on my we ..read more

In this post you'll find "2 truths and a lie" math activities, each with error analysis questions built right in. Every activity is set up the same way-- find the error (the "lie") on each card, then correct the error on the student answer sheet. Students get practice identifying math errors in the context of different math topics, and then with fixing those errors. Here is the first card from an integer operations "2 truths and a lie" error analysis activity. There are 3 integer operations problems on the card, along with 3 statements comparing the answers. Students solve the 3 probl ..read more

You probably already know that if you could fold a piece of paper 42 times the stack would reach the Moon. This always feels so unbelievable, but the math checks out! In this post, I want to share a couple handouts for students to support a discussion about exponential growth, folding paper to reach the Moon and also a few conversation starters. Before the handouts, I like to ask students to give their best guess as to how many folds it would take a piece of paper to reach the Moon. Students will likely reply with "a million", "a hundred million", or say that we can only fold a piece of pa ..read more

Last summer, my daughter worked hard to learn her multiplication facts. Some facts she memorized, some she used strategies such as building on the facts that she already knew. For example, she adds one more number to her 11s to get to 12s. This was a multiplication strategy she completely taught herself. At first she was really annoyed with me for pushing her to learn her multiplication facts, especially during the summer. But now back in school, she's having an easier time working through homework and their Friday multiplication quizzes. She's also having an easier time with division, nam ..read more

Teaching the ins and outs of budgeting was one of my favorite units to teach in Consumer Math. It started with us calculating net monthly income and ended with us commenting on how much we all spend on food. It was a fun unit to teach because it gave students the tools to analyze their own spending and how it aligned with their future goals. In our wages and salary unit, we learned that net monthly income is about 70% of gross monthly income. We often used this estimation when budgeting. We started each class with a warm-up that involved budgeting for a make believe client. Here's Marti ..read more