A comprehensive document containing background informaton for the teacher on the money system used in ancient Rome along with a complete lesson plan for having students apply the lesson to a mathematical task, which is a mythical Roman shopping list.
This is a great activity to do as part of your study of ancient Rome or even as a stand-alone mathematics lesson plan.
This Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.
It was an interesting short exercise that blended math with social studies, but my 5th/6th grade students laughed when I told them tomatoes had been on the original shopping list. Tomatoes are a New World product -- the earliest record of their arrival in Europe connects with Cortez in 1519. I edited the worksheet and replaced tomatoes with apples. We may associate tomatoes with Italian cooking today, but the ancient Romans definitely did not have them! A few students had trouble with the exchanges, and we reviewed the lesson with concrete materials that represented the three coins involved. I added a question: What if the shopping list had been for twice as much? This resulted in a new round of swaps.
January 17, 2011
Hello my friend: There are also words in Latin for computer, television, and videotape.......in fact there are many products the ancient Romans did not have besides tomatoes, but that doesn't mean we cannot add the words to the Latin language and learn the monetary system using them. This is a great problem-solving lesson that my students have always loved, you won't see anything like it anywhere else, and I find it a bit disappointing to be nailed with a rotten "tomato" for the small and unimportant historical issue in the context of what I think is a great integrated math/social studies lesson plan. Thank you for your feedback.
January 17, 2011
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I have been primarily a middle school teacher for 27 years and have loved every minute of it. For me, "content is king." I believe the plans, printables, and worksheets I have created have above all else high-quality content, but are also practical and ready-to-use. Each item I sell has been used in my and colleagues' classrooms (teacher-tested) and is clearly written. I won't put any lesson or idea on TeachersPayTeachers unless I am certain YOU can understand it, teach with it today, and that it has value for children. And I can't be certain of that unless I have used it in my classroom. In the end, however, the best plans in the world won't make any impact unless delivered by a caring, committed, and enthusiastic teacher. Enthusiasm is the most under-rated aspect of a teacher's job. If your fire is out, they won't learn and will misbehave. If you are on fire, they will learn and they will behave for you. We do the most important job on Earth, and if we cannot put our hearts in it then we shouldn't stay in the classroom anymore. That's my two cents...
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