As middle school students build and strengthen their math skills, they also learn about practical real-world applications for those skills beyond their notebooks. Our 7th grade math students recently completed a unit on percentages—learning how to write equations from scenarios and how to calculate percentage increase and decrease formulas.
For their culminating project of the unit, students combined the study of percentages with economics, history, and a bit of creativity. Using their newly honed math skills, they looked at the price of various commodities over three time periods, studying the link between those price increases or decreases to historical events in time. In small groups, they created brief video presentations to share what they’d learned about the prices of ice cream, apples, cars, sports tickets, potato chips, bananas, gasoline, lumber, and more. Some created short plays and films (complete with graphics, end credits, and blooper reels), while others showed their work with whiteboards and infographics. Whatever the presentation style, all used their ingenuity and creativity to show the link between math, history, and economics.
- fall 2021
