Maths at the Primary Snack Bar
Which snacks would you buy if you had 100 THB?
The Primary Snack Bar is a great source of excitement – and maths learning – for Year 3 students! As Year 3 is the first opportunity to receive and use Patana Cards, maths lessons are a perfect time to practice mental calculations, to understand the value of money and to plan which snacks they would like to purchase. Not only do Patana Cards encourage students’ independence, they also provide the perfect opportunity to apply maths lessons to real-life situations.
Students were given a scenario in which they had 100 THB to last the week. Each day, students were asked to choose an item from the Snack Bar menu and subtract the cost from their total, calculating how much money they had remaining. They noticed that the cheapest, but perhaps least exciting option, was to purchase a banana every day. In contrast, those who chose a smoothie or a cookie on Monday quickly realised that their 100 THB budget may not last for the rest of the week! This activity facilitated practice of addition and subtraction operations, both mentally and by using abstract methods. The lesson further reinforced the importance of understanding place value and how to partition large numbers into tens and ones.
In Year 3, students focus on developing the skills of explaining and justifying their opinions and methods. This maths activity further facilitated a discussion in which students compared various individual methods of calculating the addition and subtraction methods, as well as which method might be the most effective when shopping at the Primary Snack Bar!
