Fifth Grade Price Tracking Activity Featured on WREG

On Mondays, our fifth graders mean business! Weekly in Jennifer Stanford’s math class, our girls have been tracking the prices of eggs, milk, and bread as part of “Mean Monday.” Our girls look up the prices of designated products and calculate the mean for each item, as well as the sales tax for several items. Each week, they track 18 items from Kroger, Target, Sprouts, and Whole Foods.

“We notice the differences in prices of organic, name-brand, and store-brand items. We talk about trends we observe and make predictions about future prices,” Stanford said. “We use this data to help practice skills calculating mean, median, and mode.”

She saw that WREG recently launched a price tracking tool and reached out to the station to let them know that her girls are doing the same thing. She incorporated the Price Tracker into Mean Monday, and our fifth graders shared observations about WREG’s data in comparison to theirs. One thing they noticed was that they even started tracking prices the same week!

There are a lot of discussions about money in fifth grade as they prepare to go to JA BizTown in April. Our girls have been studying how businesses operate, researching local financial institutions and the services they offer, and gaining an understanding of being responsible citizens. When our girls heard about bird flu in January, they talked about supply and demand and decided it would be fun to follow the cost of eggs. 

“The girls have had a lot of fun noticing price fluctuations, and each week, they tell me something that they observed when they were shopping with their parents. We plan to continue tracking these items through the end of the year. We may even add a few more stores now that we’re so good at finding prices online!” Stanford said.