Senior shopping activities
The purpose of this resource is to provide suggestions to whānau about how they can facilitate maths conversations while shopping.
About this resource
This section provides some ideas for how you can raise awareness and share mathematics using everyday experiences and resources found around your home. It includes ideas for supporting your children’s learning in all areas of mathematics: geometry, measurement, statistics, algebra, and number.
This page provides suggestions as to how mathematics conversations can be facilitated at home when shopping.
Senior shopping activities
Children in the senior years may be able to take some responsibility for making decisions about what goes in the trolley and participate in budgeting and preparing lunches and meals. They will be able to use calculators to solve complex calculations and will be learning to read charts like food labels to make decisions. Practice at estimation and rounding is important because much of our “shopping maths” as adults is actually estimating rather than doing exact calculations.
Money: Children at this age will be able to make calculations involving decimal amounts and will understand that cents are the fractions of a dollar. It is a valuable skill to be able to use the information on the shelf tickets to compare prices based on units. For example, the shelf labels for toilet tissue will compare the cost per sheet, or the labels for pasta sauce will give the price per 100 ml, so you can compare different brands.
- Is it cheaper for us to buy the taco kit all in the box together or the parts separately?
- How much will it cost to make lasagne?
- If we buy this expensive roast, what sort of vegetables should we buy so we don’t go over budget?
Measurement: Getting practice in multiplying and dividing is important for this age group, and this includes working with fractions. So asking a child to estimate and then check on a calculator can be a way to fit in some of this practice.
- The 1.5-litre bottles of Coke come in boxes of 12. How many litres are in a box?
- Each packet has 345 g; how much do 10 packets weigh? 25 packets?
Solving problems:
- We spent $185 for 4 people for 7 days. About how much is that per person per day?
- About how much does it cost to make lunches for 4 people for 5 days?
- Which type of noodle is the healthiest option? Look at the fat and sodium on the label.
- Compare the Fruit Roll-Ups, biscuits, and muesli bars. Which has more sugar?
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