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.
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.
Included inside:
Pre-project warm-up
Grocery Town flyer
10 everyday meals to calculate costs, discounts, and percent discounts
3 holiday meals to calculate costs, discounts, and percent discounts
Shopping on a $40 budget, $25 budget, and no budget
Answer keys
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Over the summer and throughout the school year, I've be building up a collection of fun geometry curriculum materials for my new freshman geometry class. This will be a newish class for me to teach this year. I have taught geometry in the past, but never to students before they have taken algebra 1. This has been bringing a unique challenge.
This is a reeeeeeally long post that I started writing in the summer as a sort of geometry curriculum map, and it just keeps growing. I've come back to edit and add new links probably 50 times since then. All of the geometry activities will be here and the (free) geometry reference sheets and graphic organizers to scaffold the material for students will be here.
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.
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.
After naming angles, we'll move into writing congruency statements. We'll focus on writing congruent angles and line segments statements during this unit and complete this congruency statements 2 truths and a lie.
Then we'll get into solving for the lengths of line segments, and I know that students will need a lot of support solving equations. My students next year will be freshmen in small group special education. We call the class applied geometry, and they will be taking it before taking high school algebra. I have used this solving equations flowchart most of my years teaching to support students solving equations.
To help organize the information given for segment addition problems, I'll put this segment addition graphic organizer into page protectors for students to use with dry erase markers. There is also a graphic organizer in the file for angle addition.
Because my students haven't yet taken algebra 1, I'm going to be squeezing in equations where I can. This intro to segment addition activity will support students learning the basics of setting up and solving equations before moving to more complex problems.
I love 2 truths and a lie activities because of how they focus students on identifying mistakes. After we practice solving line segment equations in our notes, students will complete this line segment addition 2 truths and a lie. On each card there are 3 statements. Students figure out the error (the lie) then fix it on their answer sheet.
Right before the error analysis activity, we did a quick angle classification 4 corners activity. Students could refer to their angle classification reference sheet if they got stuck.
Next, on to bisectors. I'm coming back to edit this post to say that bisectors were a struggle for some reason. After class, I edited this free bisectors cheat sheet to also include "multiply and divide by 2" for finding parts and wholes of segments and angles. The original version is also included.
Task cards are nice for chunking material to make assignments less overwhelming for students. When I taught geometry in the past, students completed this midpoints, angle bisectors and angle sums activity. There are just 4 cards with multiple questions, so students can focus on one skill at a time.
Next, we'll get into supplementary, complementary and vertical angles notes, then practice identifying angle pair relationships and solving for angle measurements.
To work in some movement, students will do this 15-question angle pair relationships scavenger hunt activity. It covers complementary, supplementary and vertical angles. One question each about perpendicular angles and an angle bisector are also included.
To help students remember which angle pair is which, they'll color this angle pairs reference for their notebooks.
Students really like these escape rooms, so to practice solving for the measures of these angle pairs, I'll give them the printable version of this angle pairs relationship escape room. The puzzles get harder as the activity progresses, so every student should be able to complete at least a few of the puzzles for practice.
For more complex angle pair equations, I also have this complementary, supplementary and vertical angles 2 truths and a lie. My students are going to keep separate warm-up notebooks this year, so I might give individual cards as warm-ups for their notebooks. I like spending extra time on warm-ups (20 minutes) because it breaks up the time and reviews important material from the previous class.
This will finish up our fundamentals unit, after which we'll move into coordinate geometry. Hopefully there will be some board room for my large magnetic coordinate plane because I already know students will struggle with plotting coordinates. I'm going to present coordinates as (time, height) or (time, amount) so that the x and y values feel different from each other.
To make sure everyone knows that we read x then y before moving into coordinate geometry, we'll do this coordinate plane secret codes activity where students decipher (x, y) coordinates that are written in symbols.
After students learn slope in middle school, they can make mistakes plotting coordinates. One is y then x, the other is x then y, which can trip kids up. We'll review plotting before we move into coordinate geometry and the Pythagorean Theorem.
Students will be introduced to the Pythagorean Theorem in the coordinate plane by first identifying each right triangle's vertex coordinates, then counting to find leg lengths, then using the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate hypotenuse lengths.
We might not get to this distance in the coordinate plane activity, but after posting the Pythagorean Theorem in the coordinate plane activity, teachers on Facebook asked for a "tilted" legs version. In this version, none of the triangle legs are aligned vertically or horizontally.
Coming back to this post towards the end of our coordinate geometry unit to remind myself not to forget this distance in the coordinate plane escape room activity next year! I will give it as part of test review this year, but I think it would be better as classwork after learning Pythagorean Theorem.
Next up is calculating missing midpoints and endpoints, and I remember students struggling with this from the last time I taught geometry. We'll start with finding the midpoints and missing endpoints of horizontal and vertical segments, then move to diagonal segments. As an intro activity, I'm going to give students this hands-on endpoints and midpoints worksheet. Students will use their right triangle to measure the line segments then fill in each table. There's a 4-question exit ticket at the end.
After coordinate geometry, our curriculum moves into area and perimeter, which surprised me a bit but makes sense to refresh students' memories of the formulas. I made this area formulas reference sheet to go along with an area stations lab. There are written directions on the sheet for finding the area of each shape for students who are intimidated by the formulas.
Then students will begin working on the area stations lab, where they'll measure the shapes before finding area to connect back to this skill. After finding area, students calculate the cost to paint each shape. They'll find the area of a square, rectangle, triangle, circle, parallelogram, rhombus and trapezoid. There's also a Google Slides intro presentation.
I'll slip this area and perimeter coloring worksheet into the curriculum because it's a good review from middle school. Irregular shapes often come up on our 10th grade state exam, even though students learn this skill in earlier grades.
Next students will find both area and perimeter, both on and off the unit grid. I made a couple versions of these area and perimeter worksheets with diagonal lengths labeled and not labeled. If students are comfortable with the Pythagorean Theorem, I'll give them the version without the diagonal lengths labeled. All of the diagonal lengths stem from Pythagorean triples.
From coordinate geometry, our curriculum breaks for a while to solve equations. After equations, we'll move into triangles.
I won't have my own classroom this year so can't hang a word wall. Luckily, I have a digital version of my geometry word wall to send to students as an additional support.
After identifying triangles, we'll move into triangle sum theorem. The first 7 cards of this triangle sums 2 truths and a lie error analysis activity just have students finding missing interior angle measures. The last 3 cards have students also solving for variables.
If students need support with the triangle sum theorem, I'll give them this triangle sum theorem graphic organizer. I'll either laminate or put them in page protectors to use with dry erase markers.
For extra practice or just for fun, students can work on this missing angles escape room. The digital version is self-checking, so I'll know who successfully broke out by answering all answers correctly.
Towards the end of the year, we'll get to transformations and use a series of templates for reflecting and rotating. I used a hole punch here, but students can use a sharp pencil to poke holes in the paper. This is a skill students learn in 8th grade here, but it always comes up on the 10th grade state test.
This geometric transformations rules reference is also from my geometry word wall. I'll probably give the black & white version to students as a coloring sheet and reference for their notebooks.
As the year goes on, I'll be updating this post with all new geometry materials. You can find them all in this big geometry bundle:
