Flour Sack Baby Project

This is a wonderful project that not only teaches students responsibility, but also the costs associated with a baby and the challenges it poses to anyone's lifestyle. This project has students research information as well as around a flour sack baby for a week and documenting their experience in their journal and family photo album.
Some of the things included in this project are:
1. a letter that can be sent home to parents a week prior to the start of the project giving them a overview and having them bring in the flour/sugar sack
2. budget spreadsheet
3. extensive directions
4. journal
5. birth certificate and so much more!!
Each student receives a disease that could potential affect a young child and a job with a salary and deductions for things like taxes. This salary is then used to guide them through their monthly finance spreadsheet.
For the documents, most need to be on a portrait page, but for purposes of including everything in one document, they had to be changed to landscape in order to accommodate a few of the pages. As a result, you will need to do a little formatting to make things on their correct pages.
This is a fantastic project that my students have really enjoyed throughout the years! Parents have also found it as a great tool to talk about things at home that relate to the project, but never really had a chance to bring up and discuss with their children. The time in class is to set-up the project as well as give students time to work on some of the information. This could be a great cross-curricular project with a biology and math class!