Distributive Property- Restaurant Style

I wanted a fun way to introduce the distributive property and show my students how it could be applied to the real world. So, depending on the time of day, I had my kids pick a place they wanted to eat (morning classes had to pick a good breakfast spot and then later on in the day I had them pick their favorite lunch spot). I told them we were going to breakfast/lunch. (Of course this was hypothetical, but it REALLY got their attention!) During class I looked online to see if there was a menu for whatever restaurant they picked (if there wasn't they had to pick a different place) and we picked numerous food items that everyone in the class, including me of course, would be ordering. So we had the number of people in the class on the outside of the parenthesis, and then on the inside we had the prices of each food item. We talked about what it meant to distribute something. And then I took our example and distributed the number of students to the first food item. We talked about why this wouldn't be the final answer. The kids really got into this. Some students thought this may be correct because we did distribute the number outside the parenthesis to one number inside. But then some students almost had a panic attack saying things like "NOOOO!! We haven't gotten to my favorite food yet and so I won't get it, because there isn't enough of it for everyone!" They got that we not only needed to distribute the number outside to the first number inside, but all numbers inside.

So then we calculated how much money we would spend on each food item. That was a reality check for the students too. They couldn't believe that we could spend over $200 on rice, or some small appetizer! Then finally we calculated the total cost by adding each food item cost together.

After this, came the halleluiah moment for me as a math teacher. In every class, I had at least one person ask if they were "allowed" to take the total cost and divide it by the number of people we had to determine the cost per person. AND some people even wanted to calculate tax for the total bill! Sometimes my students are so brilliant!

And the cool part was, they thought out of the box. I expected to hear answers like McDonalds or Subway for their restaurant choices, but no they picked places like Sake, so we got to take a look at more unusual places, which the kids thought was really cool.

I did this activity 2 weeks ago, and now all I have to say is, remember what we did when we went out for breakfast/lunch! And they remember how to simplify an expression using the distributive property!