Students take over Uncle Ray’s pop-up Halloween costume shop and run it for three weeks: set markup prices, match a rival store’s sale, pick a Halloween-week discount, clear the shelves and pay the sales tax. An interactive, auto-graded Grade 7 activity on markup, discount and sales tax (7.RP.A.3), with unique numbers for every student.
Boo-tique: Three Weeks to Halloween | Markup, Discount and Sales Tax Activity for Grade 7
Looking for a Halloween math activity that gives your students real percent practice instead of a coloring sheet? In Boo-tique, a family emergency calls Uncle Ray out of town and he hands the student the keys to his pop-up costume shop. They have three weeks to sell five costumes, set every price, fend off a rival store and pay Uncle Ray back for the stock. Whatever is left over is theirs.
Every number they calculate goes into the shop’s cash register, so students can see their markup and discount math turning into money they earned (or lost).
What students do
Why teachers like it
Skills covered
Standards: CCSS 7.RP.A.3 (multistep ratio and percent problems: markups, markdowns, tax). It also supports 7.EE.B.3 (multi-step real-life problems with rational numbers).
Grade level: Grade 7, also works as a review for Grade 8 or for students who need extra percent practice.
Time: one class period.
Format: interactive digital worksheet on TeachRealMath, plus an intro slide deck.
Perfect for the last weeks of October, a Halloween math center, a sub-day activity or a hands-on review before a percent unit test.
Students use proportional reasoning to solve multistep real-world percent problems (7.RP.A.3) while running a seasonal costume shop. They apply a percent markup to wholesale costs to set shelf prices. They then apply percent discounts to those shelf prices and see that a markup and a discount of similar size do not cancel out, because each percent is taken from a different whole. They also find sales tax on total sales, use unit prices and quantities to calculate revenue, and compare profit per item against the extra sales a deeper discount brings in. Along the way they judge whether a pricing decision makes or loses money, and decide whether the shop covers its stock cost.
The worksheet supports randomization, if enabled, each student will get different prices, markups and discounts to work on, the storyline and context remains the same. This helps prevent copying of answers.
💡 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.
Use proportional relationships to solve multistep ratio and percent problems. Examples: simple interest, tax, markups and markdowns, gratuities and commissions, fees, percent increase and decrease, percent error.
All 7.RP.A.3 activities →
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