Business Math

Just a quick post with the promise of a longer one this weekend. As usual, things are pretty busy around here.

I started a new block this week, despite the challenges of Halloween festivities throwing a wrench into our beginning of the block rhythm. We had a celebration after main lesson on Monday and then a skating party for the day after Halloween. It was a lot of fun, but didn’t lend itself to a good race-through-the-gates start.

We are quite into the block now, though, and the work we’re doing is really helping me to notice how different my students are compared to last year. I’m finding that the business math content is suddenly inserting my students into the world. They are now interested and want to know about the world in a way that just was not at all present last year.

We started the block talking about different economic systems — self-sufficiency, barter and money. Everyone was fully engaged as we talked about each system and the benefits and drawbacks of each. I’ve also introduced percents and we had a nice conversation about where we hear talk about percents in the world. The students were full of examples — “50% off,” “split it 50/50,” test scores, tipping and tax. We had a lively conversation about the different tax rates in different states and they were quite interested to find out where was the most affordable state to live in, when it comes to tax. Tomorrow I’m bringing the list of states with their tax rates and I’ll have students choose a state. I’ll create some sample questions that they can all calculate so they can see the price differences for each state.

We’ll also extend our economic system conversation to start bringing the question of how things are given value. Some students have already brought this up, mentioning that dollars are just “pieces of paper” and that it costs more than a penny to make a penny. Clever children, they are.

My plan for next week is to bring a game to the class where we can have the experience of determining the value of things. I’m imagining creating a currency and each student would earn a salary that they would trade for recess time, having friends do their chores, we might even bring things in to sell to our classmates.

This really is turning out to be a fun block!