Today's math

Today we talked about median, range, and average. I told the kids that we were going to run a special at their dad's restaurant. They got to come up with the special. It was smoked toad bellies with a side of snake ears topped with jellied fly testicles. (They had been encouraged to make it something utterly ridiculous. I think they did well.) I explained that this special would run for 2 weeks. We took the numbers of the special that had run the week prior and tried to see what we could discover about how well it sold. We made a table and then figured the median number, the range, and the average of how many specials sold that week. We talked about ordering and sales trends. We talked about how many specials we would want to make ahead of time so that we didn't have to make them during the dinner rush. We wanted to make enough, but not too many. Any that were made ahead of time that didn't sell would have to be thrown out and would end up being lost inventory. I then gave them sales figure for the special for the first week. Again they did some figuring and decided if they wanted to make any changes in the amount of product that was prepped ahead of time. It was a lot of fun. I think their dad would approve of the lesson, just not the special.