My students are finishing up their graphing and data unit this week. Graphing and data is a unit that is easy to incorporate fun activities into. We found mean, median, mode, and range with goldfish crackers. Kids created line plots for the amount of red Skittles in a handful. We timed ourselves doing jumping jacks to see how many we could do in 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and 90 seconds to create a line graph. However, I was feeling graphing overload and wanted to incorporate a different activity that didn’t involve an X and Y-axis. I opted for a fun day of review with money!

I created a math treasure hunt. I found some adorable price tags on TPT and put prices on each one. Then, I taped them to objects around my room. Students were told to:
1. Buy as many objects as they can! They each have a total of $20 to spend.
2. Add up the objects they selected.
3. Find how much change they would receive if they paid with a $20 bill.

We have math first thing in the morning, so I already had the price tags taped around the room when they kiddos arrived. They kept running up to me while I greeted students at the door asking “WHY ARE THERE PRICE TAGS?? ARE YOU SELLING THESE ITEMS?”. Of course I said yes 🙂 Who wouldn’t sell their class a box of baby wipes?

This was a great way to incorporate math into real-life situations. Many students asked if they could buy the same item twice (no, there’s only one globe! How could you buy two?) or if they could go over the $20 they have. A few looked shocked when I said that isn’t how it works in the real world! Merchants will not let you off the hook if you’re $.53 short! Some kids tried to get as many items as they could for the $20, while others wanted the big items.

If you’re interested in any products about money, I have an interactive notebook that I adore, as well as some good math money games like Money War and Bakery Match-Up to review counting money!