Learning to use money to make change? Count on a pretend restaurant or store—complete with bills and coins—to captivate the imaginations of clerks and customers alike.

• 1.

  Here’s a great way to use your writing, drawing, and money skills at the same time. These ideas are for opening a pretend diner. You could open your own pet shop with stuffed animals. Or set up a grocery store with food cartons. How about designing a bank with recycled boxes? Create any place where you can practice counting money and making change.

• 2.

  What could you name your restaurant? What kinds of food will you serve? Pick a theme, catchy name, and logo. Decorate the outside of a pocket folder with your restaurant’s name and logo using Crayola® Colored Pencils and Markers.

• 3.

  On construction paper, draw and color foods and beverages that you will serve. Cut them out with Crayola Scissors. To make your restaurant menu, glue the food pictures to the inside of your file folder using Crayola Glue Sticks. Write the prices next to each picture.

• 4.

  Draw pretend paper money on construction paper. Look at samples of your country’s currency to make sure you have some of each denomination. Decorate each bill with numerals showing the amount, your country’s name, and a picture. Color your pretend bills and cut them out.

• 5.

  Use Crayola Model Magic to form coins. To create your own colors of Model Magic, knead color from a Crayola Washable Marker into white Model Magic. Continue to add marker color until you’ve made the shade you want. Shape your coins. Let them air-dry.

• 6.

  Cut small pieces of recycled paper on which to write orders and receipts. Staple your pages together. Add your restaurant’s name and logo to each sheet.

• 7.

  Place everything in your folder pockets. Set up your restaurant. You’re ready for your first customer!

Standards

• LA: Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., read a number of books on a single topic to produce a report; record science observations).
• LA: Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade level topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.
• LA: With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.
• LA: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience with appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details, speaking clearly at an understandable pace
• MATH: Solve two-step word problems using the four operations. Represent these problems using equations with a letter standing for the unknown quantity. Assess the reasonableness of answers using mental computation and estimation strategies including rounding.
• MATH: Identify arithmetic patterns (including patterns in the addition table or multiplication table), and explain them using properties of operations.
• MATH: Use place value understanding to round whole numbers to the nearest 10 or 100.
• VA: Use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.
• VA: Use visual structures of art to communicate ideas.

Adaptations

• Collect a variety of restaurant menus for students to preview. Take a visual walk through the menus, identifying the types of food offered and the cost of items. Ask students to calculate the cost of one, two, or three meals using their menus. Also ask students, while working in small groups, to compose addition and subtraction problems involving ordering food from the menus.
• If your school has a school store, ask for a list of items in the store and prices for each item. Provide student groups with a given amount of money to work with. Students are to "spend" the money purchasing items. Groups are to try spending as much of the money as possible, having little or no change remaining.