FREE Restaurant Simulation - Add and Subtract Money Math Center with 3 Levels

I was really excited about this idea but the flow of the activity just didn't work well. To begin with, it's pretty difficult to find restaurants that still have paper take-out menus (it worked best to visit local businesses in a college town and to avoid big chains). Also, do check the menu first and see if they even have prices on there for drinks and desserts. None of ours did! I guess these are more subject to inflation than entrees. I teach in a mixed-age classroom. The younger students (counting money) were the customers and the older students (adding and subtracting decimals) were the servers. I even got them rolls of real coins to use. All in all, I was very excited and so were they! But the customers had absolutely nothing to do while the servers were calculating their bill. They just sat for 10 minutes and waited. Then when the servers gave the customers their total, they paid in large bills (so that the servers could subtract across zeroes and calculate their change) and so the younger children didn't end up practicing their coins at all! This would work best in a homeschool environment where the child and parent can be one-on-one. A crowd of bored children is never a good idea. I tweaked this twice and we tried it three times in all, and the pacing of it just never worked. The servers were overwhelmed and had too much to do, and the customers had basically nothing to do after they read the menu and ordered.

I teach instructional special education classes. This served as a great supplemental activity!

Thank you so much for this! It was so helpful with my fourth graders!

This has been one of my favorites to use in my stations!

Had to find a local menu for students to use but was great practice.

This is a good simulation to use with take-out menus and maybe even some food props. It would also be good to use in a PBL setting -- perhaps one where you develop a menu, develop prices, then simulate running the restaurant and making change. One small revision that I think would improve the worksheet would be to include a line for recording the amount paid by the customer. Effectively, the server would tally the "bill" and then take/record the payment and calculate the change needed (effectively preparing a receipt). It would also be good to extend this with older kids by showing them how to calculate a tip.

10/10 great activity would use again in the future

My students loved using this resource for their morning work. They were engaged in the resource and had no trouble getting started.