Christmas Dinner Budget Challenge Activity

This engaging and festive mathematical investigation activity/time-filler is perfect for those busy school days in the run up to Christmas. Students shop for ingredients for the perfect family Christmas dinner, but must stay close to a budget of £100.

With minimal set up and explanation needed, students are asked to access a familiar supermarket website of their choice to choose seasonal foods and other festive items

Their challenge is to budget for the perfect Christmas dinner menu - they have a target budget that they need to get as close to as possible in order to win their challenge.

Students must select suitable foods (and other festive items) from their chosen supermarket and log the name of the item and the price onto a Google Sheets spreadsheet, which will automatically calculate their overall total. They need to log a set number of items in each of several different categories (e.g. “main meal” or “starters” etc.)

Closest student, to the target budget - without going over - wins !

There are two differentiated levels to the activity. In Challenge 1, the spreadsheet will automatically work out the overall total. In Challenge 2, this feature is disabled so that the student has to work out the total for themselves.

Buyers who order this resource will receive a PDF document which includes links to the two files that make up the activity - a set of instructions (a Google Slides file link) and the editable spreadsheet (a Google Sheets file link). Buyers can choose to access a US version or a UK version of both the files.

Clicking the links will prompt the buyer to create a copy of the files on their own Google drives, which is licensed for their own personal use. Buyers are reminded that the resource is intended for use in their classroom only and should not be shared with other educators or on school websites. It should also not be passed to third parties of any nature, or sold on.