Real Life Math - How Many Crackers?

I told my math group today a 100% true story - rather an embarrassing little secret I keep. Each year, I can never quickly figure out, or remember from past years, how many boxes of graham crackers I need to buy for our cookie cottage activity. There I stand in the cracker aisle, box in hand, staring a while at the label while thinking, "Hm - now how many crackers per house? How many servings per box? How many crackers per serving?" and so on. It is a whole lot of mathematical steps!

This is an great example of a real life math opportunity. At home, always be on the lookout for this type of thing. Cooking from recipes, measuring, estimating - it's everywhere if you are open to it!

Anyway, I posed this problem to the children. Say I wanted to buy enough crackers for both Tate and myself to use. We each have 11 students, so 22 houses. How many boxes of graham crackers should I buy?

First I sketched out the patterns for the house:

Two whole crackers for two sides, two whole crackers tilted in for the roof, two half-crackers for the shorter sides.

Children were given a picture of the nutrition facts (spoiler: not good) of graham crackers and they could work in any grouping they chose. Most worked together in teams, and lots of great conversation was heard. In the end, we all needed to work together to come up with the correct answer of just over 4 boxes - so 5 boxes, with lots of extras for all those broken ones that naturally happen. More for the maker to eat!