Camping and Rates Project

My third grade class is nearing the end of a unit on rates. We’ve been discussing tables and how to use them to record rate information. The students have been given a number of opportunities to fill in missing sections of tables when not all the information is present. They’ve been required to find unit prices of items to comparison shop.  We spent a couple days just on that topic. Whenever money is involved I think the kids are just a tad more interested in the problem. For the most part, students were able to find the unit price of items. It was a bit of a challenge to round items to the nearest cent. I used Fawn’s activity to help student explore this concept.  For example, 32.4 cents per ounce is different than 32 cents per ounce. When to round was also an issue, but I believe some review helped ease this concern. Near mid-week, students were picking up steam in having a better understanding of rates and how to find unit prices to shop for a “better buy” when given two options.

I introduced a camping rates activity on Wednesday. This was the first time that I’ve tried this activity as I have time to use it before the end of the year approaches. Here’s a brief overview: Students are going to be going on a camping trip. The student is responsible for shopping for the food (adding the unit prices), sleeping bags (for the entire family) and tent. They can spend up to $50 for the food and their complete total has to be less than $500.

Students used Amazon to find the items. The most challenging part in this assignment was finding tents and sleeping bags that were the appropriate sizes. The tent had to be at least 100 square feet and each sleeping bag at least 15 square feet. That’s where some problems starting to bloom. Converting the measurements for the tents and sleeping bag took some time. Most sleeping bags were small enough that their measurements were in inches and students needed to record their answers in feet.

The tent dimensions were in feet so that didn’t cause much of an issue. Students had to figure out which dimension indicated the height and not include that in the square feet. Although, some students thought that was an important piece. Maybe I’ll change this assignment up next year to add a height component. So this took a bit of explaining and guidance, but we worked out the kinks. Students used tables to convert square inches to square feet.

Next week, students will be creating a video of their camping activity. They’ll be taking some screen shots, explaining why they picked each item, (I chose food/this particular tent/sleeping bag because …) explain the unit prices of the food items, describe the process used to find the square feet of the sleeping bag and tent, and how they were able to keep the total cost below $500. I believe they’ll be using Adobe Spark to create this presentation. I need to remember to cap the videos at around three minutes, as some go a bit too long as they might talk more than they needed. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out next week.

Author: Matt Coaty

I've taught elementary students for the past 14 years. I enjoy reading educational research and learning from my PLN. Words on this blog are my own. View all posts by Matt Coaty