Holiday Shopping Fun

Are you looking for a project to get you through these next couple of weeks before break? A few years ago, Emily and I developed a holiday shopping project for students in Kindergarten through 6th grades. The idea of the project is simple: Your students will shop for important people in their lives and keep track of the money they spend. This is a great way to work on adding, subtracting, multiplication, and decimals.

Using the template we provided, choose an appropriate range for the total amount of money you want your students to spend. For K-2, keep it between $20-$100. For third grade, keep it within $1000. For 4th-6th grade, I suggest going up to $100,000 because students struggle working with greater place values. Ask your parents to send in the holiday shopping ads they receive in the mail. The more you have, the better! You can also have students look up prices online. Students have to choose between 5-8 people for whom they want to buy presents. 

Once those parameters are set, your students can go shopping! For each person they choose, they need to buy between 2 and 5 presents. Using the worksheet provided, they will record the item and its cost and keep an accumulated total of how much they spend on that person. After shopping for each person, they need to find how much money they have left to spend on the remaining people on their list. At the end of the project they will total up how much money they spent on each person, how much they spent altogether, and how much money they have left. 

Some modifications for different grade levels--in K-2, we have attached shopping pictures your students can use. You can make multiple copies of the picture cards and have them glue them into their booklet for each person. In grades 3 and 4, keep it to whole numbers. Have students round the dollar amount to the nearest whole number; don't overcomplicate this! This is a great way to talk about estimation without getting too much in the weeds with procedures. If it's easier to do front-end estimation, use that strategy. For grades 5-6, keep the decimal values on the prices. This will give your students practice doing operations with decimals. Pull multiplication into the project by requiring students to buy multiple quantities of at least 1 item for each person. For grades 3-4, this will give you practice with whole number multiplication, and for grades 5-6, students will practice multiplication with decimals. 

If you are interested you can find this product on multiple places on the website, but use this link for easy access. 

Happy Holidays!!