PBL Spotlight: 5th Grade Restaurant Math Tipping Guide
by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD
Every year since their kindergarten years I have extended my offer to teachers of my daughters to help out in any way they might find useful. Some of them have taken me up on my offer and asked me to chaperone a field trip or help with some minor classroom activities on special occasions, and I was happy to help.
But I was ecstatic in 2017, when my oldest daughter’s 5th-grade teacher, Kristen Rowling (now Taylor) asked me to collaborate on some PBL planning and co-teaching. What we came up with together was a relatively short project that incorporated an authentic audience and a product that helped her contextualize a need to learn how to mathematically work with decimals and percentages in meaningful ways.
This project isn’t meant to serve as an exemplar–for that please