Consumer Math Projects

In this post, there are links to a few highly engaging consumer math projects that cover budgeting, buying a car, and shopping at the grocery store to plan meals. All of the projects are no-prep print-and-go and include answer keys.

Grocery Store Shopping Project

Consumer math project 1: Grocery Store Shopping

In this consumer math project, students read a grocery flyer to price food items, compare weekday prices against weekend sale prices, and shop for ingredients to build everyday meals and holiday meals. 

Students then get to build their own day of meals, staying within a $40 budget, a $25 budget, then one extravagant plan with no budget! This grocery store project gives students real-world practice calculating food costs, adding decimals, calculating discounts, calculating percent savings, and seeing how far their money can go on a budget.

Buy a Car Project

Consumer math project 2: Buying a car

Are your students curious about what it costs to buy a car? In this buying a car project, students learn about the cost of buying and owning a car, from the price of the car to its insurance and gas. 

First, students choose a car they'd like from six car choices. Next, they choose a bank loan from four choices. Each loan has a different term, interest rate and down payment. 

Students record the price of their car, the bank loan's interest rate, the loan term and the down payment. Students will then use an online auto calculator to find total interest paid over the course of the loan, total paid for their car and monthly car payment. Then students are tasked with figuring out the cost of gas based on their car’s mpg and tank size.

Budget Project

Consumer math project 3: Budgeting

Students build their budgeting skills in this project that juggles career choices, car choices, housing choices, habits, and savings. Will they stay within their budgets? 

To start the budget project, students mix and match career, home, car and habit cards to build the lifestyle they'd like to live. 

CAREER CARD: choose 1 of 6 careers, each with its own salary and student loan payment, 

HOME CARD: choose 1 of 4 apartments, each with its own rent, electricity, internet and food costs. Each apartment is also a different distance from work, 

CAR CARD: choose 1 of 4 cars, each with different car payments and average miles per gallon, 

HABIT CARD: choose 1 of 6 habits (coffee drinker, video gamer, dinner eater, road tripper, breakfast eater and car cleaner). 

Students calculate their net monthly income by using a 70% approximation, and work through the project calculating costs and analyzing budgets. Will they stay within budget or go over in any of the budgeting categories?

Consumer Math Activities Bundle

All of the projects in this post have been added to this big consumer math activities bundle, along with a bunch more engaging printable and digital consumer math activities.

BROWSE ALL CONSUMER MATH

Squares & Cubes Cheat Sheets

We're just about through our coordinate geometry unit, and will be taking the unit test the end of this week. While we learned about the Pythagorean Theorem, I made students this little half-sheet of squares and square roots for their notebooks. 

Students use TI-30Xs calculators, so there are also keystroke directions on the sheet for typing in a square root and converting from a root to a decimal.

After posting the squares sheet on Facebook, a few algebra 2 teachers asked for one for cubes and cube roots, so I finished this one today.

You can download the sheets free here:

Squares & Square Roots

Cubes & Cube Roots

Browse all free math cheat sheets

Math Breaks Board

If you could use a filler for those last 5 minutes of math class when the activity is done and the bell just needs to ring, I put together a PDF of links to different online math games.

The PDF is clickable, so that you can choose (or have students choose) a short game to fill those last few minutes.

The interactive math breaks board PDF is here in my Google Drive.

> Browse math puzzles

Introduction to the Pythagorean Theorem

We finished up our introduction to geometry unit, and moved into coordinate geometry and the Pythagorean Theorem last week. First, we reviewed plotting coordinates. Then, we found lengths of vertical and horizontal segments in the coordinate plane. This week, students will learn about the Pythagorean Theorem and calculate diagonal segment lengths.

Since it has been a while since my students have plotted points in the coordinate plane, we started the unit with a fun coordinate plane secret codes activity.

Students got a code sheet to reference during the secret codes presentation. The presentation asked students to figure out what letter each symbol pair represented, then what 3-letter words. Above is one of the words questions.

The presentation is scaffolded with the x coordinates colored black for the first few slides to remind students to look at the x-axis first. Then, this extra coloring is taken away to better mimic the real coordinate plane.

As an aside, my classroom aide and I were talking about why students have trouble plotting points. My best guess (after trying to figure this out for the last 20 years) is that points are plotted x then y, but slope is found y then x. I think students confuse these two.

Then we moved into distance in the coordinate plane. I gave students a little segment lengths reference sheet for their notebooks.

We completed this distance in the coordinate plane worksheet together on the board that covers the lengths of vertical and horizontal segments. Students started to see the relationship between integers when finding distance. I let students know that they can always count the spaces between the coordinates, but that if they're feeling lazy, they can always subtract (like me!). We spent extra time on this because integers can often be a sticking point for students.

Pythagorean Theorem video

After this, we are moving into the Pythagorean Theorem with a presentation of videos from this Pythagorean Theorem YouTube playlist and interactive diagrams from Geogebra:

• Geogebra Pythagorean Theorem link 1: Pythagorean Theorem animation showing the areas of a and b squared equal c squared with a slider
• Geogebra Pythagorean Theorem link 2: Lets you click and drag the sides of a right triangle to see the square areas made by the legs and hypotenuse.
• Geogebra Pythagorean Theorem link 3: This one lets you click and drag the vertices of a right triangle looking for Pythagorean triples

The template from the video is here in my Google Drive. I printed the second page in 3 different colors for the video. If there is time, students will use the template to build 3-4-5 Pythagorean Theorem diagrams.

As a reminder, students will get this Pythagorean Theorem reference sheet for their notebooks.

We then did some practice with right triangles on this Pythagorean Theorem graphic organizer. My co-teacher last year told me about 1/2-page page protectors, so I slipped the graphic organizer into those. Once everyone is pretty solid solving for C given two leg lengths, we'll complete a couple Pythagorean Theorem activities to solidify things.

Then students will complete this Pythagorean Theorem in the coordinate plane activity, where they'll record coordinate points as a review and calculate diagonal segment lengths of right triangles. There's a more advanced version here where most triangle side lengths are all diagonals.

> Browse all Pythagorean Theorem activities

Over the last few months, I've been making some new geometry activities, games, cheat sheets, "2 truths and a lie" error analysis, and escape rooms to get ready for my new teaching assignment. My students take geometry before they take algebra 1, which will bring a unique challenge. So I've been building up a collection of engaging geometry activities that hit the geometry standards while also being fun.

High School Geometry Activities

After starting the year reviewing integers, order of operations, and the scientific calculator functions, we'll get into geometry fundamentals. We'll start fundamentals by identifying angles, lines, rays and line segments. Students will color this angles, lines, rays, segments worksheet.

Then will match drawings, symbols and names to complete this angles, lines, rays, segments matching activity.

Sometimes, I like adding mazes or other fun little activities to student warm-ups to help get pencils into hands when students enter class. Here I added a maze to our first intro to geometry warm-up with maze. There are a bunch of online maze generators to choose from that allow you to make mazes in different shapes.

When I posted an angles, lines, rays segments coloring sheet on social media, a teacher asked if I could also make a naming angles coloring sheet. 

Fun Ideas for Teaching Place Value and Rounding

Whether students are rounding, comparing numbers, estimating, working with money, or multiplying by powers of 10, having a firm grasp of place value builds students' number sense and confidence in their math abilities.

SHOP ALL FALL MATH ACTIVITIES

Increasing and Decreasing Finder Tool for Graphs

Do your algebra students struggle with finding the increasing and decreasing intervals of graphs? This increasing and decreasing finder tool guides students where to look when finding the increasing and decreasing intervals.

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Students watch the graph move up and down the ruler on the side.

domain and range finder tools w/ increasing and decreasing

"These helped my algebra students so much! The directions on each finder were so helpful...especially when the graph has arrows and not endpoints." - Elizabeth Y

The increasing and decreasing tool was added to a similar domain and range finder tool that guides students where to look when finding domain and range. See the domain & range / increasing & decreasing tools here.