## Savvy Sellers and Spenders

• Lesson
• 1
• 2
3-5
2

This second lesson places students in the shoes of a real business owner. Students have chosen the products they want to sell, rented locations, and prepared advertising; now they get to experience the thrill of the sell as they spend their $200 on stores' merchandise(s). Students experience real-world applications of adding and subtracting decimals while learning what it means to be a smart consumer. If the previous lesson, Building a Business, was not used you need to: • Place students into groups. • Develop a product list with wholesale prices for students to choose from. • Give groups a budget of$500 which they can use to purchase products and advertising materials (see materials list for suggested advertising materials).
• Have students determine selling prices for products.
• Allow students time to create advertising materials to be used at their store (You may want to create a poster template for students to use to decorate their store and advertise their products and specials).

Give students time to set up their store in the section they have rented. Break each group into two selling teams. Explain that this allows at least one selling team to be available to sell the group's products, while the other selling team can be out spending the $200 on their debit cards. Explain that groups need to keep track of all business transactions that occur. Using the Savvy Sellers Activity Sheet, students will keep track of the money that is collected from each student, in addition to how many products they have sold. Businesses may not sell more products than their store has originally had, unless they had extra money in their original budget set aside for this purpose. In addition to the business writing down their sale for their own records, a worker must write on the customer's debit card: the name of the store, what was purchased, the amount of money it cost, and how much money is left on the customer's debit card. Give each student a My Debit Card Activity Sheet and announce that "Selling Team #1" will be remaining at their business, while "Selling Team #2" goes shopping at the other businesses. Students do not have to buy the same items as their team members; buying is an individual activity. Give students five minutes, and then, have "Selling Team #1" go shopping while "Selling Team #2" remains at their businesses. Any money that is left on the student debit cards will be added up at the end and divided evenly among the groups. You may have a student group who finishes early complete this task, or have each group share the amount of money that was left on their debit cards. To do this, write the leftover amounts on the board, and have the students figure out how much money should be given to each group (by adding up the numbers and then dividing by the number of groups). Have students notice that the amount of money each group gets is also the mean of the amounts of money that each group had left over. Have students work together to answer Questions 1 and 2 on the Were you a Moneymaker? Activity Sheet. Students need to determine how much money was collected during the selling phase, and then, subtract all of their costs (less than or equal to$1,000). The group with the highest profit will be declared "The Money Makers!"

Have students complete the Were you a Moneymaker? Activity Sheet individually. Discuss questions 3–5 as a class. Discussion suggestion: have students stand or sit in a circle around the perimeter of the room, and pose question #3. Use a soft ball to toss to a student who then says his/her answer. This student then tosses the ball to another student who shares his/her answer and so on. Continue for questions 4 and 5.

Assessment Options

### Learning Objectives

Students will:

• Apply previous learning involving pricing a product, creating an advertising campaign, and selling a product.
• Apply and adapt a variety of appropriate strategies to solve problems.
• Use problem solving skills and number sense to become smart consumers.
• Monitor and reflect on the process of mathematical problem solving.
• Develop number sense.

### NCTM Standards and Expectations

• Develop and use strategies to estimate the results of whole-number computations and to judge the reasonableness of such results.
• Select appropriate methods and tools for computing with whole numbers from among mental computation, estimation, calculators, and paper and pencil according to the context and nature of the computation and use the selected method or tools.
• Develop and use strategies to estimate the results of rational-number computations and judge the reasonableness of the results.

### Common Core State Standards – Mathematics

• CCSS.Math.Content.4.MD.A.2
Use the four operations to solve word problems involving distances, intervals of time, liquid volumes, masses of objects, and money, including problems involving simple fractions or decimals, and problems that require expressing measurements given in a larger unit in terms of a smaller unit. Represent measurement quantities using diagrams such as number line diagrams that feature a measurement scale.

### Common Core State Standards – Practice

• CCSS.Math.Practice.MP1
Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
• CCSS.Math.Practice.MP4
Model with mathematics.
• CCSS.Math.Practice.MP5
Use appropriate tools strategically.
• CCSS.Math.Practice.MP7
Look for and make use of structure.