By: Nicole

Nicole — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 15:59:57 +0000

My children use unit rate frequently in the real world. We calculated how much gas it would cost to drive to Texas or New Orleans from our house in California and compared that to the cost of a plane ticket or train ticket. We decide which boxed snacks to buy after figuring out the cost of each item individually. We buy rice, margarine, chips and other items that we use frequently by figuring out which size packages are the cheapest by volume. When they fundraise, we know we don’t want to sell anything for over a dollar so we see which candies can be bought for fifty cents or less so that every item sold is at least a fifty cent profit. When we sell loose candies for spare change, we compare the profit and time required from a spare change drive to those of a dollar per snack drive and they decide which drive to do next after considering which takes the maximum time as well as which brings the greatest profit. When they want a special treat that doesn’t cost too much, we figure out how long/how many games they can play at the arcade for the same price of going to the theater and they decide which is more worth their time. When we buy toilet paper, we literally compute the cost per square of our preferred brands to decide which to buy that trip. When we want to envision how big some prehistoric animal is, we calculate how many of our living room wall or double garages long it is, or how many beds in a row, or how many kitchen tiles, or how many counter depths, since these are things they know the size of and can visualize readily. When we want to compare an animal’s life span to ours to see how old it is in its own “critter years,” we decide the typical lifespan of the animal and conpare it to an 80 year old human lifespan then compute. There are lots of ways to throw math into every day living and musing

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By: Nicole