Practical Mathematics

Currently, Munchkin is not working with her traditional math book. Instead, we have been doing some practical application in preparation for our upcoming move. This week, we are working on trip planning. For most of these activities, I created lapbook components to go put in our Creation Science lapbook.

Mile to Kilometer Conversions

• She has converted miles to kilometers for the distance that we will travel.
• She has calculated how many miles we would need to travel per day if we want to make it to our new location in X days.
• She has calculated how many days it would take if we traveled X miles/kilometers per day.

Mile to Kilometer Conversion Component

Trip Planning

• After we determined that we wanted to make it to our new location in X days, she planned out our stops for the trip.
• She found campgrounds that met our criteria (which meant adjusting some of the stops).
• All this was input into googlemaps, and travel plan was formed.
• We printed out the travel plan for future use.

Gas and Lodging

Next up was estimating how much this trip would cost for gas and lodging.

• She wrote down our estimated miles per gallon per vehicle based on numbers from the past.
• We found out the average gas price for each state that we’d be traveling through.
• She calculated the average gas price that we’d be paying based upon those prices.
• Based upon that figure, she calculated the estimated cost of gas for each vehicle that we’d be driving.
• She wrote down the name of the campgrounds where we would be staying as well as their rates. Using this information, she figured out the cost of our lodging for the trip.

Vehicle One Gas Component
Vehicle Two Gas Component
Lodging Component

Taxes and Discounts

We’ll wrap up the week by tackling taxes and discounts.

• We will look at the average sales tax rate for the state.
• Munchkin will then look for discounts offered for the different campgrounds (military, AAA…).
• She will then recalculate the costs for our nightly stays taking into account the discounts and taxes.
• She will compare the differences between the before sales tax/discount costs and the after discount/sales tax costs.

Cost Analysis Component

Munchkin has decided that this type of math is fun, and she’s enjoying figuring out all of the information. It’s helping us as we’ll have all of this information readily available to us. In addition, it allows her to have some control over the current craziness in our lives.