Groceries

• Use the grocery ads from the newspaper to create story problems including maths facts. Try to make the problems interesting. Here is an example: Ms Animal-Lover owns a pet shop. She needs food for the dogs, cats and rabbits. Find food items in the ads that the animals will eat. How much will she spend if she needs 50kg of food for the dogs, 8kg for the cats and 3kg for the rabbits?

• Now, write your own problem. Have a partner try to solve it.  Talk over whether enough information was given and how difficult it was.

• Ask students to bring in the grocery dockets from recent trips to the supermarket. With these in hand, the students can read through newspaper advertisements and observe if the same quality items were less at other stores. Then they can determine the savings or lack of savings from one store to another and the amount they could save over a period of six months or a year. They can also factor in driving costs from home to the various markets, grocery coupons, and availability of certain items. Lastly, they can look at the content of the items bought in terms of saving size, calories, vitamins, fat, cholesterol, sodium and preservatives.

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