“Welcome to Deci-mole!” exclaimed Michele McPhillips as her fifth grade math students entered the classroom, which was redesigned as a restaurant for a hands-on math activity.
The students eagerly chose their seats and waited to learn what surprise was in store for them.
At Deci-mole, students had many local restaurant menus to choose from. Given a variety of word problems, they imagined what appetizers, entrees and desserts the restaurant goers would choose and calculated the bill.
“We just finished a big unit on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimals, and this is a fun way to show them why it is important in their life,” shared McPhillips. In other words, decimals have a point!
Students used different strategies including repeated addition and multiplication to find the totals, and enjoyed checking their work with a calculator at the end of the financial literacy activity.
Romell Faulknor shared that decimals is his favorite topic he’s learned so far in math. “I like math a lot. It’s fun,” he said.
For students that finished quickly, there was a challenge question to calculate the tip. “I was happy to work on the tip amount because I’ve never done it before,” Faulknor said.
Patrick Grogan chose a pizzeria menu because pizza is one of his favorite foods. “I learned how you use decimals in real life,” he shared. “I like getting to talk about the foods I picked with friends and work on the problems together.”
For the first problem, he selected a shrimp basket, cheese pizza, cheese steak, meatball parm, chicken tenders, cannolis and an Oreo cookie bash for a family of four visiting the restaurant.
It is safe to say that the students were ready for lunch after visiting Deci-moles!