Math Monday::Plan A Party!!!!

Posted by tiff in Math Mondays | Comments Off

Math, schmath.

What we really like over here are parties!

This week is a big one for us. Naturalist turns 14 (!!!!), we have a day of rest, and then Golfer turns 11 (!!!!), we have a day of rest, and then Hubby and I have our anniversary.

As much as a party girl as I am, coordinating all that is a bit overwhelming. And a few years ago, Naturalist decided to take over her party, which turned out to be a great big help. And a great big exercise in math!

Take a catalogue like Oriental Trading Company. It is a treasure trove of mathmatical goodness!

Sit down and set a budget with your kid. Decide what you need to get with that budget…purely decorations or gift bags and tableware too. Decide how many people you’ll have at your party to help with the amount of party stuff you’ll need. Once you get the groundwork down, sit back and let them plan away.

A calculator helps keep track of the running total of all the goodies. They quickly learn navigating unit prices vs. bulk prices, staying within a budget, prioritizing, organizing categories, making hard choices between two good things, and calculating sale items to stretch the budget further.

This is our kind of math!

At the end we figure out what the cost per person is, and what happens if we invite more/fewer people to the party.

Now that I’m writing this up, it’s reminding me how genius party planning is for teaching and learning math concepts. We haven’t done it in a while, but I use to have stacks of old Oriental Trading Company catalogues laying around for ‘theoretical’ party planning, and the kids could use it to come up with different theme parties if we ever had one. Sometimes our theoretical budget was large, sometimes it was small. Either way, it was a lot of fun.

This is a perfect holiday activity–forget doing everything yourself…let your kid(s) plan the decorations for Thanksgiving/Halloween/Christmas, and then let them set it up using their awesome mathmatical budgeting/computing/unit pricing/planning skills!