Back to School Shopping: Rational Operations
In this interactive worksheet, students take on the role of a savvy shopper preparing for a new school year with a limited budget. Using real-world prices, discounts, tax rates, and savings goals, they must solve multi-step problems involving all four operations with rational numbers. This activity supports mastery of 7.EE.B.3 by reinforcing practical applications of decimals, fractions, and percents. Students will reason strategically, make decisions based on mathematical calculations, and determine whether their spending meets the financial constraints.
Skills Practiced:
- Solving multi-step real-world problems
- Practicing word problems
- Operations with positive and negative rational numbers
- Working with decimals, fractions, and percents
- Budgeting and financial reasoning
- Perfect for classrooms focused on math fluency and life skills!
Learning Objective
Students will apply operations with rational numbers—including decimals, fractions, and percentages—to solve multi-step real-world budgeting problems. They will reason strategically, convert between forms, and evaluate whether their spending decisions meet given financial constraints.
Randomization Available
If randomization is enabled, each student will receive a unique version of the activity with different item prices, tax rates, and discount percentages. This ensures individualized practice and reduces copying, while keeping the overall structure and learning objectives consistent.
💡 Tip: When assigning this activity to your classroom, you can optionally enable randomization to give each student a unique version of the problems. When you re-assign the same worksheet, each student will get a new set of questions, helping them master the content through repeated practice.
