Since Bubba has mastered money (at least to a level that she and I are satisfied with), we decided to expand our math into a real world situation. We had a quick crash course on rounding numbers to the nearest dollar Monday morning. After she had the hang of it, we ventured out for our weekly grocery trip. For every item that we placed in the cart, she wrote the price in her notebook, rounded to the nearest dollar. When we got home we added up her list of numbers and compared them to the receipt’s subtotal. We ended up being only $0.75 over. Even I was impressed- I expected a larger difference between the estimate and the actual number. We are going to keep a tally of our results for a few weeks and then graph the actual vs. the estimate. After that we will try rounding to the nearest dime for a few trips and graph those results to see how much closer we get with more precise estimating. (added bonus * it kept her well occupied during the shopping trip and cut down on the usual shopping trip antics)
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Hey, great idea! I might try that with my MATH kids. Interesting that it came so close. I think…since they don’t have a grocery store in my town I teach in (imagine that!)…or even a SUPER STORE…. I would just take a grocery recipt in, and orally give them the numbers and have them to the “rounding” and then see what their total is versus my actual total.
I am working on giving my students some old postage stamps and am having them come up with and which stamps (1,2 4, 5 or 10 cent), and how much money I would need to bring to the post office (which the town does have…but they are closed for about 1 1/2 hours during noon!!!:)…to purchase stamps to get them all up to the 41 cents postage I would need. I will sure try the grocery list idea!
Comment by Great Aunty V November 8, 2007 @ 9:26 pm