Smoothie Fractions: Run the Bar

The Smoothie Bar: An Interactive Real-World Fractions Lab for Grades 6-7

Turn fraction practice into a story your students actually want to finish. In The Smoothie Bar, students spend one day running their own smoothie business, and from open to close, almost every decision comes down to fractions. They plan a big order, check last year's sales records, take stock of the pantry, serve walk-in customers, bottle drinks for a group to go, and cash out at closing time. The math is never abstract drill. It is the tool that gets each job done.

This is a complete, auto-graded, interactive lab built on connected worksheets, not a stack of unrelated practice pages. The numbers students produce on one worksheet carry forward into the next, so a careless error early in the day shows up later, just like in a real kitchen. That carry-forward design keeps the reasoning honest and the story coherent.

What your students will practice:

• Finding a fraction of a set and simplifying to lowest terms
• Checking equivalent fractions using cross-multiplication
• Comparing and ordering fractions (with drag-and-drop)
• Adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators
• Multiplying fractions and scaling recipes by a fraction
• Dividing a fraction by a fraction in a real measuring context
• Applying fractions to money and real-world decisions

Why teachers love it:

• Real-world context that sticks. Every problem has a genuine business reason, so students see why fractions matter outside the classroom.
• Auto-graded and interactive. Immediate validation, visual feedback, and live progress tracking mean less grading for you and faster feedback for students.
• Built-in differentiation. Early worksheets give 6th graders a confident entry point; later scaling and division worksheets stretch 7th graders.
• Flexible pacing. Run the whole lab in one or two class sessions, spread it across one to two weeks as a worksheet-a-day, or set it up as self-paced stations.
• Teacher-ready. Includes a full teacher guide, editorial intro slides for each worksheet, and a closing summary that ties the day together.

Common Core aligned (Grades 6-7): 6.NS.A.1, 6.RP.A.3, 7.RP.A.1, 7.RP.A.2, 7.NS.A.3, plus review of equivalent-fraction and comparison foundations.

Perfect for fraction review units, sub plans, math centers, test-prep consolidation, or any time you want students engaged in real-world math instead of another worksheet. Give your class a reason to care about fractions.