Grocery Store Math

3 February 2012 

This morning I found myself lost on the internet. I was preparing my schedule for next week and decided that I wanted to incorporate some educational flash game sites on the kids "computer days" Tuesday and Thursday. I came across Manga High, a math website where you have to sign up as a school and I registered my "home school" as a school and included on the roster, not only my own kids, but all of my nieces and nephews as well. It took up most of my morning, so I didn't get any reading done before we had to go grocery shopping.

At the grocery store I began asking the kids to locate the name label in the produce department and the prices. Ra asked me why I was getting the brown pears instead of the green pears. I had her show me the different kinds of pears she saw and I helped her read the labels. There were Bartlett pears, D'Anjou pears, and Bosc pears. I had her tell me how much each cost, and which one cost most and which one cost least. I told her that was why we were buying the Bosc pears, because they were the least expensive. While picking out our pasta I had the kids find which brand was on sale and verify that it was the cheapest. Then I had Ra identify the bowtie pasta, El identified the shell pasta and Ca identified the macaroni pasta.

On the cereal isle we looked at the brand of cereal we always buy and the kids know they can pick from the "blue bag" cereals. I showed Ra where the Net Weight was written on the bags and had her compare the weight of the "blue bag" to the "orange bag" cereals. The "blue bag" was 32 oz and the "orange bag" was 39 oz. She told me there was a difference of 7 oz and that it was the "blue bag" that had fewer ounces. I then had her compare the prices. The "blue bag" cereal was $3.88 and the "orange bag" cereal was $6.79. I told her that the "orange bag" cereal was almost two times the price of the "blue bag cereal but it didn't have two times more cereal in the bag, so the "blue bag" cereal was cheaper.

We had a similar exercise when choosing Orange Juice. I started by having them identify the ones which where on sale, then had them choose the cheapest one. It was a Half Gallon for $1.99. I had Ra look at the full Gallon of the same brand to make sure that $1.99 was the best price. I had her round up $1.99 to $2.00 and figure out the cost of buying a gallon's worth of orange juice if we bought them as Half Gallons. The full Gallon orange juice wasn't on sale, but it was $3.49. Ra told me we needed to buy the Gallon orange juice and not the two Half Gallon orange juices, because it would be cheapest.

To summarize, we were at the grocery store for 30 minutes and we went over identification, pricing, grouping, colors, sorting, units of measurement, rounding, and overall I had the best shopping experience with four young kids at the grocery store I could ever have imagined. Next week I will give Ra the grocery list and have her keep track of the prices so we can know how much we will be spending before we check out.

The kids spent the rest of the day with Grandma J who is going to be out of town for a couple weeks. They went to the Aviary and the Recycle center with Grandma and had a fun time. We read for 20 minutes before the kids went to bed and I am planning on getting in a few chapters of Little Britches by Ralph Moody before I call it a night.