8 Tax, Tip, and Discount Activities for Math Class

I’m excited to share with you some ideas for tax, tips, and discount activities for your math classroom. If you’re looking for ideas on how to plan for teaching this topic, you can read more here. Teaching tax, tips, and discounts is a great topic for activities because it’s a real world topic from top to bottom. And 7th grade students get great review with proportions in real world applications. The activities in this post are excellent for independent practice, bell ringers, anticipatory sets, homework, math centers, etc.

Here’s the list of 8 tax, tips, and discount activities:

Anticipatory Sets

I love to use videos for anticipatory sets. If you find the right videos and have students looking for one thing, or answering one focus question, during the video they can be engaging. It is a great way to get students keyed in at the beginning of the day’s lesson. My go to site with a wide range of videos and a little bit of silliness is Shmoop.com.

Shmoop video about percents

This free video from Shmoop shows some examples of percents. After watching this video in my class, it organically started a conversation about credit cards. Most of my 7th graders knew nothing about credit cards and how they work, so it was cool to see the look on their faces when they realized how much more they have to pay for something on a credit card.

Lately, the question I’ve been asking my students during videos is, “What is the central idea of this video?” My wife teaches language arts at the same school as me and I know that students struggle with finding the central idea. So, this gives me a way to help out with improving language arts skills.

Percents-Math Bites with Danica McKellar

This video is 5:30 and has a lot of information about percents. The video is one in a series from Danica McKellar who played Winnie in the Wonder Years. This is a quirky video mixed with some math concepts. Also, it features a female mathematician. I think it’s great to show girls that math is for girls, too. This works as an activity at the beginning of class and will activate students’ prior knowledge.

Partner Activities

I love having students work in partners. Students are so much more engaged when they work in partners, and if you train them right they’ll help each other. When I was first a teacher, I was reluctant to let students talk to each other. But I’ve learned how to leverage their enthusiasm for talking to actually help them learn. I absolutely love partner activities because they keep students more engaged and greatly increases the amount of math talk happening in my classroom. Here are a couple of tax, tips, and discounts activities for you to try out with your students:

Paper chain with a partner

I love paper chains. When I first heard about them I was skeptical. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me why they needed to make a chain. But then I did this Tax, Tips, and Discounts Paper Chain activity with students. Students put the answers in order and it gets students working together. After they put all the questions in order, they get it checked. Finally, they put the chain together. It doesn’t take that long and we have a trophy of sorts to show their learning. I’ve learned (again) not to knock something until you try it.

Math at the mall online game

Math at the Mall is a free game from Math Playground. I have the students play this in partners because they are more likely to keep each other accountable. It’s just a cute and engaging way to get students to do some real world practice. The questions are good and students love getting to play a game. They answer questions and collect gold coins. This could be used as a fast finisher tax, tips, and discount activity.

Task cards

There are so many things that you can do with task cards. My favorite is having students work in partners. I always use self-checking task cards because it gives students the opportunity to think about their mistakes. These tax, tips, and discounts task cards are scaffolded and move up from one level to the next as you go.

Independent Tax, Tips, and Discounts Activities

Mazes

This is a set of three mazes about finding tax, tips, and discounts. I like to use them as a bell ringer after the students have gotten the hang of it. These particular mazes have two mazes where they are just finding the tax, tip, or discount and the last maze they have to find the total after tax, etc. Also, these mazes work great as a review activity later in the year. Students are so engaged with them and they are so much less intimidating than a regular worksheet. We basically do a maze everyday in my class.

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Quizizz

Quizizz is an online quiz maker that turns questions into a fun game. Students can race against each other and earn points. They like it a lot. One thing that I love about this site is how many quizzes have already been made for you. I usually search for the topic I want and scroll through a lot of options. Next, I chose one and make a duplicate. After that you can customize it to your needs and set it to play. I like to choose “homework” mode. All you have to do is give your students a code and they can play. Here’s one example of a great game for this topic, and here’s example 2. Try this and I promise your students will like it. Quizizz assignments works great for a quick formative assessment or a quick homework assignment.

Whole class game to review tax, tip, and discount

Most of the time we review before a test with a whole class game. It gives me one last chance to see how they are doing and to fix any misconceptions that are still out there.

Jeopardy

There are a variety of whole class games that I like. For this topic we played a Jeopardy game from Scaffolded Math and Science. It was a great way for the students to review. We were crunched for time so we didn’t get through all of the questions. The questions consisted of easy to hard difficulty questions. Pro tip- I would suggest to first show students the unique way Jeopardy questions are asked because some of my kids got confused about that format. It was fun and I got to see exactly what they could and couldn’t do.

Wrapping it up

This unit on tax, tips, and discounts engaged my students and they had a lot of fun with the different activities. I hope that you can find some of these ideas useful and adapt them to your classroom.

If you are interested in getting our tax, tips, and discount activities that are no prep, just print and go, you can check them out here: Mazes, Paper Chain, and Task Cards.

Thanks so much for reading. Until next time!