Place Value Math Project - Real Life Math - Run a Fast Food Restaurant

This resource is included in PDF format for printing and in Google Slides™️ format for digital learning. This makes it useable with Google Classroom™️.

Are you looking for a way to reinforce place value concepts in an engaging way that helps your students make connections? “Run a Fast Food Restaurant” is a real-life math project where students will complete thirteen different tasks, each one focusing on place value skills. This project will help your students see how place value is used in real life. In this particular project, students work with place value to the thousands. It is ideal for 3rd-4th grade.

You might choose to print specific tasks to use during Math centers, or you might make a booklet out of all of the tasks and let your students choose which one to do when. The choice is yours.

Take a look at what you’ll find inside this math project:

TASK #1: BUSINESS IDEAS

You have decided to start a fast food restaurant! On this page you’ll brainstorm your restaurant’s name, as well as some marketing ideas.

TASK #2: SUPPLY DELIVERY

Today a big order of supplies arrived. You need to double check to make sure that the correct amount got delivered. Use the place value chart to work with thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones.

Skills: place value to the thousands, base 10 representations, comparing and ordering, working with data, expanded form

TASK #3: ADVERTISING

Advertising is important for your business! You’ll use a combination of different types of advertising to get the word out about your restaurant! In this activity we’ll work with a bar graph and a chart to compare our data and use place value strategies to compare and add.

Skills: addition, comparing, ordering

TASK #4: THE MENU

In this activity we’ll use the clues to find the price of each item and complete the menu.

Skills: addition, money

TASK #5: ORDER TOTALS

In this activity we will use the menu from the previous activity to figure out and work with the order totals.

Skills: addition, number words, bills and coins, ordering from least to greatest

TASK #6: SURVEY YOUR CUSTOMERS

For the next shipment, you want to make sure that you order the types of foods that your customers want! Let’s do a survey!

Skills: bar graph, base ten blocks, interpreting data

TASK #7: NEW MENU ITEMS

Today is a big day at your fast food restaurant! It’s time to announce your two new surprise menu items. They are going to be a huge hit with your customers!

Skills: expanded form, base ten representations, addition using place value strategies, more/less, number words

TASK #8: SALES FORECASTING

You’ll need to predict the number of each item that you will sell over the next week. This will ensure that you have enough supplies.

Skills: skip-counting by 25, 50, and 100, data interpretation, addition

TASK #9: ACTUAL SALES

This page shows your actual sales from the week. We will compare your actual sales to the sales forecast (Task #8) to see how close you were in your predictions.

Skills: number words, comparing using subtraction, data interpretation

TASK #10: INVENTORY DAY

Inventory is important when you own a business! This means that we count all of the supplies to see what we have available.

Skills: number words, expanded form, comparing using greater than and less than, ordering from least to greatest, addition using place value strategies

TASK #11: CHARITY DRIVE

Supporting the community is important when you have a local business! You’ve decided to recruit some other local businesses to donate to charities in your community.

Skills: expanded form, money, ordering from least to greatest and greatest to least

TASK #12: TODAY’S REVENUE

It’s important to know exactly how much money you’re making when you own a business! Let’s take a look at today’s revenue.

Skills: rounding to the nearest 10 and 100, addition, comparing estimates to actual, number words, expanded form, base ten blocks

TASK #13: FAST FOOD BY THE NUMBERS

You’ll have to work with a lot of numbers at your restaurant. Let’s take a look at a few of them!

Skills: addition using place value strategies, rounding, base ten blocks, number words, expanded form

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WAYS TO USE MATH PROJECTS IN YOUR CLASSROOM:

Math projects are an ideal way to consolidate learning. I recommend using them as an engaging activity AFTER skills have been learned rather than during learning. You will likely find that engagement is very high and that your students ask to do more of these!

There are many ways to use math projects in your classroom. Some of the most popular are:

•a small-group or pairs activity

•a guided math activity to allow you to see where your students are struggling

•a fun, rewarding way to engage your early finishers

•a low-prep, easy-to-implement activity for a substitute teacher

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Enjoy!

Shelley Gray

www.ShelleyGrayTeaching.com