Surviving Thanksgiving Week in the Middle School Math Classroom

Depending on how your winter holiday falls, the week of Thanksgiving can be a lot more stressful than the week before winter break. For most students, they are only in school Monday and Tuesday and they know they have a 5 day break ahead full of feasting and sleeping in! Unless you are required to do so, giving any sort of assessment those days is tough. The kids will be checked out – you will be checked out and you will probably have a lot of absent students!

So – what do you do? Worksheets? Please don’t. Fluff work? Stay away! The kids can smell fluff work from a mile away and discipline problems will run high. My suggestion is to give them a project that is meaningful, engaging and gives them options. My favorite project for this time of year is my Holiday Shopping Madness Project.

If your students have already learned percent change – this is the perfect practice or review skills project. Students are given the opportunity to browse sale ads (either physical ads or online) and determine the percent change in the price of the projects. This opens up opportunities for discussion about which deals are really good and which deals only appear to be good up front!

My favorite part about this project though, is the portion that allows students to create their own shopping ad. They can create the ads using markers and paper, or on the computer using any program they are comfortable with. Their ads can include anything you’d like – new and old prices, percent discount, percent change, etc.

The best part about this project for you? Ok, well there are two great parts. The first is that the ads and the student products will change dramatically from year to year – keeping grading interesting for you. The second is that this project easily takes two class periods…. hello plans for Monday AND Tuesday. If you have shorter class periods (30 – 45 minutes) you can always modify the amount they are expected to do.

You can certainly do this project on your own – but if you’d like to have a pre-made version, you can purchase it for only $3 by clicking here!

Hope you enjoy!