As a math teacher, I can tell you that it’s surprising how little students understand money in the real world. As soon as we apply a math skill to a situation in a word problem, many children really struggle. Some of that is because of the added requirement of reading comprehension, but that’s not all of it. Students need more financial literacy woven into their every day lives.
Looking for ideas? Here are a few things you can do when you go out to lunch:
- Talk about jobs vs. careers. Talk about how one moves up from one position to another. Talk about how salaries increase with more education, and with more responsibility. Talk about how investing in an education comes back in income for sooo many years.
- Look around the restaurant and talk about all the things that need to be paid… the staff, the electricity, the rent, the food supplies, the heat, the air conditioning, the kitchen supplies (pots, pans, etc.), cleaning supplies, etc. Talk about how what you pay for that cheeseburger pays for all of those things, not just the ground beef and the bun.
- Before the bill comes, estimate the total. Discuss how you can round to make that easier. It’s always a good idea to have a rough number of how much you have spent so you notice when a mistake has been made. See who can get closest with their estimate!
- Once the bill is there, talk about how in our country, tipping is a portion of a server’s pay, and it is often shared with others like busboys, etc. Teach your children how to find 10% of a number by just moving the decimal one place over. 20% would be double that number. It’s easy once you know how. Help them build the skills.
Look for opportunities for your children to learn when they aren’t with you. That’s how TREP$ started. We wanted a project-based learning experience for our kids that would be a fun way to learn about math in the real world. So we created an entrepreneurship program for kids- to teach them how to start and launch real businesses. They learned so much! They needed to come up with a unit cost for their product and establish a fair price that would allow them to make a profit after all of their expenses. They needed to make change at the TREP$ Marketplace, so they had to learn how to “count up.” They learned about business math concepts like revenue vs. profit. It was awesome. So find opportunities like TREP$ for your kids!
