Activity 8

Buying Groceries

At the grocery store with little kids:

  • Let them count items as you put them in the basket.

  • Let them hold the bag open while you put potatoes, or apples, into the bag, and count them as they go in.

Let them get things off the shelf and put them in the basket, at your direction. Ask for the biggest box of cereal, or the smallest. Ask for the coffee in the green can, or the black bag. Ask for the crackers on the bottom shelf, or the middle shelf.

 

At the grocery store with kids in school:

  • When your kid has an idea of how much a dollar is, and what is more than 50¢ and what is less than 50¢, there is a real job he can do at the supermarket— keeping track of how much the bill will be. Ask your kid to help you keep track of the total amount as you put the groceries in the cart.

  • If you want to be sure you’ll have enough money when you get to the till, round all the numbers up to the next dollar higher. When the first thing goes into the cart, ask how much it is, then ask how much is the next dollar higher. Then help figure out the price to the nearest dollar. For example, if the item is $1.79, ask, “What is the next dollar up?”.
Give him a piece of paper and a pencil. Ask him to make a mark for every dollar you put into the cart. If, for example, you put in something that costs $1.79, he will show that as $2.00, and make 2 marks on his page.
Then you put something in the cart that costs $1.19. The next dollar higher is $2.00, so he will make 2 more marks.
Then you buy something that costs 99¢; that is very close to $1.00, so he’ll make another mark, but the fifth mark goes sideways. Every $5.00 you put in the cart will result in a mark like this.
The next dollar you spend starts another set of marks. As you go along, he can count the crossed lines by 5’s to give you a running total.