During this lesson I tried to focus on some new goals that were developed during my midterm conference with my CT and PRT. One focus was behavior management; I needed to make myself revolve around the room so that I could more easily notice undesired behaviors and address them before the made and impact on the lesson. Another focus, was on student learning and engagement. I feel as though learning and engagement go hand in hand; If they're not engaged, they're not doing their most meaningful learning.
With lesson plan in hand, I introduced the lesson with a video on how to make a lemonade stand. I then provided the students with the request for proposal. The purpose of this lesson was for students to add and subtract decimals; what better way to do that then have them deal with money. Their goal was to create a lemonade stand for J.A. Biztown. This is very relevant to the students because they will be taking a field trip to biztown in early December and will need the skills learned in this lesson to be successful on this filed trip. The students were required to make a menu with prices including whole numbers and decimals, a budget plan, and a business plan, and apply these three things to 2 different real world business scenarios. I cannot explain to you the excitement that my students had knowing that they were in charge of their our design, menu, money, etc. They asked questions like, "can we make coupons?", and "can we have flavored lemonade?". I was so excited to be able to respond that YES, they can create their business and menu any way they wanted, as long as they followed the criteria. The criteria was that they must have at least 3 items on their menu, they must create a business plan, budget plan, and menu, and they must include at least one item price that included both dollars and cents. I really saw a difference in the quality of student work when they were so excited and engaged to produce a meaningful product. They were working collaboratively, having meaningful discussions about how much to charge, and how they could make the most profit. They were debating whether their prices were reasonable for the type of customers they might have, and including coupons and buy one get one deals. As you can see from the criteria, none of these tasks, such as coupons etc., were required by me, but were created by the students in an effort to make legitimate business decisions. I rotated around the room while asking questions and addressing the class, making sure not to stay in one spot too long. The purpose of my movement was to detour undesired behaviors, but that was absolutely not needed during this lesson. The students were so engaged that the only trouble I had was actually getting them to stop working when class was coming to and end.
At the end of the lesson, I took a very informal thumbs up, thumbs down survey about whether or not they preferred this project based learning as opposed to their traditional classwork. I got a 100% thumbs up on this survey and couldn't have been happier. Planning this lesson was extremely difficult and time consuming, but was well worth it. My students were able to produce work that they were proud of, took ownership of, and that was meaningful to them. Their processing of the mathematics was much better than I expected and I think this was because of the collaborative nature of the lesson. The students were teaching each other how to add and subtract the money and there was so much learning going on that I genuinely want to teach STEM lessons for the rest of the year.
Lesson Plan Lemonade Stand