About
Are you looking for a way to reinforce place value concepts in an engaging way that helps your students make connections? “Run a Fast Food Restaurant” is a real-life math project where students will complete thirteen different tasks, each one focusing on place value skills. This project will help your students see how place value is used in real life. In this particular project, students work with place value to the thousands. It is ideal for 3rd-4th grade.
Ideas for Use
Math projects are an ideal way to consolidate learning. I recommend using them as an engaging activity AFTER skills have been learned rather than during learning. You will likely find that engagement is very high and that your students ask to do more of these!
There are many ways to use math projects in your classroom. Some of the most popular are:
•a small-group or pairs activity
•a guided math activity to allow you to see where your students are struggling
•a fun, rewarding way to engage your early finishers
•a low-prep, easy-to-implement activity for a substitute teacher
You might choose to print specific tasks to use during Math centers, or you might make a booklet out of all of the tasks and let your students choose which one to do when. The choice is yours.
This resource is included in PDF format for printing and in Google Slides™️ format for digital learning. This makes it useable with Google Classroom™️.
What's Included?
Take a look at what you’ll find inside this math project:
TASK #1: BUSINESS IDEAS
You have decided to start a fast food restaurant! On this page you’ll brainstorm your restaurant’s name, as well as some marketing ideas.
TASK #2: SUPPLY DELIVERY
Today a big order of supplies arrived. You need to double check to make sure that the correct amount got delivered. Use the place value chart to work with thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones.
Skills: place value to the thousands, base 10 representations, comparing and ordering, working with data, expanded form
TASK #3: ADVERTISING
Advertising is important for your business! You’ll use a combination of different types of advertising to get the word out about your restaurant! In this activity we’ll work with a bar graph and a chart to compare our data and use place value strategies to compare and add.
Skills: addition, comparing, ordering
TASK #4: THE MENU
In this activity we’ll use the clues to find the price of each item and complete the menu.
Skills: addition, money
TASK #5: ORDER TOTALS
In this activity we will use the menu from the previous activity to figure out and work with the order totals.
Skills: addition, number words, bills and coins, ordering from least to greatest
TASK #6: SURVEY YOUR CUSTOMERS
For the next shipment, you want to make sure that you order the types of foods that your customers want! Let’s do a survey!
Skills: bar graph, base ten blocks, interpreting data
TASK #7: NEW MENU ITEMS
Today is a big day at your fast food restaurant! It’s time to announce your two new surprise menu items. They are going to be a huge hit with your customers!
Skills: expanded form, base ten representations, addition using place value strategies, more/less, number words
TASK #8: SALES FORECASTING
You’ll need to predict the number of each item that you will sell over the next week. This will ensure that you have enough supplies.
Skills: skip-counting by 25, 50, and 100, data interpretation, addition
TASK #9: ACTUAL SALES
This page shows your actual sales from the week. We will compare your actual sales to the sales forecast (Task #8) to see how close you were in your predictions.
Skills: number words, comparing using subtraction, data interpretation
TASK #10: INVENTORY DAY
Inventory is important when you own a business! This means that we count all of the supplies to see what we have available.
Skills: number words, expanded form, comparing using greater than and less than, ordering from least to greatest, addition using place value strategies
TASK #11: CHARITY DRIVE
Supporting the community is important when you have a local business! You’ve decided to recruit some other local businesses to donate to charities in your community.
Skills: expanded form, money, ordering from least to greatest and greatest to least
TASK #12: TODAY’S REVENUE
It’s important to know exactly how much money you’re making when you own a business! Let’s take a look at today’s revenue.
Skills: rounding to the nearest 10 and 100, addition, comparing estimates to actual, number words, expanded form, base ten blocks
TASK #13: FAST FOOD BY THE NUMBERS
You’ll have to work with a lot of numbers at your restaurant. Let’s take a look at a few of them!
Skills: addition using place value strategies, rounding, base ten blocks, number words, expanded form
What Teachers Are Saying
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "I used this resource the first time at the end of the school year after state testing. The students seemed to enjoy it. It was also nice to spread it out over about a week and not worry about planning math for each day. In the future, I may use this at a different time of year to review place value." Leslie H.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "I used this resource as a recap at the end of the school year. It was fun and engaging for my class but kept them busy AND stopped them going too crazy as the school year came to an end. Also allowed me to check the skills they had and what to let their teachers know for next year." Miss Greenwood
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "I used this for a homeschooling 2nd grader. I felt it covered many topics we are studying in 2nd grade math very well, and was much more engaging than the textbook! We had a lot of fun with this one!" Kristin R.
