General Goals:
Our goal is to empower students to attain the knowledge, attitudes, and life skills needed to succeed as responsible and productive citizens in the 21st century. At the beginning of the project, students are “married” by their instructors. They are assigned occupations and salaries. With money “earned” from their occupations, students create monthly and yearly budgets to include house payments, car payments, taxes, food, and a host of other expenses encountered by the typical family. Houses and cars must be selected from the paper and cost must be calculated with interest. These expenses must be worked out into monthly payments. Other expenses such as telephone, insurance, formula, etc., must be researched and must be figured into budgets.
Through this project, we intend to:
1. Reinforce the issues and skills needed for independent living.
2. Teach general budgeting techniques through the use of technology, i.e. Microsoft Excel.
3. Teach students to understand the importance of making and maintaining a budget in today’s world.
4. Teach students that sticking to a budget means saying “no” to extra expenses in some cases.
5. Teach students how to budget for unexpected expenses, “life’s little road bumps”.
6. Teach the importance and the difference that a college education will make in their future, and in their budget.
7. Prepare students for living within a set income.
8. To formulate an understanding of the use of a budget.
Regarding Scope and Sequence
Mathematics:
It is important for students to experience practical applications for seemingly unrelated mathematical skills. This project is designed to allow students to experience the application of basic mathematical skills to practical life situations which involve the use of everyday mathematics. The completion of this project will provide students with practice of basic computation skills while participating in an activity that does not involve rote or repetitious learning. The visual aspect of the pie chart will give students a clearer understanding of percentages and how they relate to the whole.
1. Basic operations on whole numbers and decimals.
2. Working with percentages.
3. Interpreting graphs.
4. Data entry on spreadsheets.
5. Problem solving.
6. Number Sense and Number Theory--articulate and model the relationship among decimals and percents.
7. Estimation, Measurement, and Computation--compute and estimate with decimals.
8. Patterns, Functions, and Algebraic Thinking--represent situations with tables and graphs.
9. To give the students experience in using Microsoft Excel to create a pie chart with a spreadsheet.
Links For This Project
About Baby
Spreadsheet Portion
Evaluation
