Learning Context
	The purpose, objective, or focus of the learning experience:

The Reality Store is a place where students pay bills after planning their budget for a level of income based on a predetermined level of education. Students apply decision-making, problem-solving, and management processes to develop and follow a spending plan to meet established goals with a degree of accuracy. The goal is to develop the knowledge and skills needed to use these processes in practical, real-life situations involving the use of money. They visit a series of learning stations that require making budgeting decisions.

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Overview

Guiding Questions:

1. How does an adult make decisions when formulating a spending plan?
2. What is the relationship between education and employment, and one’s quality of life?
3. Why is mathematics important in everyday life?

Eighth grade Home and Career Skills students are familiar with the Reality Store concept from fifth grade when they selected a career and paid for household expenses as they took a walk through life. Unlike fifth graders, who keep a simple tally of household expenses, the middle school students receive a salary and plan a budget based on an inventory of projected education and lifestyle at age 28. They use checkbooks donated by a partnership with Lockport Savings Bank to pay their bills. The planning of a budget and calculations for check writing are perhaps the most challenging parts of this project.

The Reality Store is used as a culminating assessment for units on consumerism and money management in 8^th grade Home and Career Skills classes about the third week of a 13-week course.

Family and Consumer Sciences

Standard 3: Students will be able to manage their personal and community resources.

Performance Indicators:

• Understand how the family can provide for the economic, physical and emotional need of its members.
• Understand the resources available to them, make informed decisions about the use of those resources, and know some ways to expand resources.
• Are able to budget money.
• Understand how working contributes to a quality of living environment.

Career Development and Occupational Development

Standard 3a: Students will demonstrate mastery of the foundation skills and competencies essential for success in the workplace.

Performance Indicators:

• Apply a combination of mathematical operations to solve problems in oral or written forms.
• Understand the material, human and financial resources needed to accomplish tasks and activities.

Mathematics

Standard 3: Students will understand mathematics and become mathematically confident by communicating and reasoning mathematically and by applying mathematics in real-world settings.

Performance Indicators:

• Mathematical Reasoning: Apply a variety of reasoning strategies.
• Operations: Add, subtract using decimals.

English Language Arts

Standard 1: Students will listen, speak, read, and write for information and understanding.

Performance Indicators:

• Develop information with appropriate supporting material, such as facts, details, illustrative examples or anecdotes, and exclude extraneous material.
• Use standard English for formal presentation of information, selecting appropriate grammatical constructions and vocabulary using a variety of sentence structures, and observing the rules of punctuation, capitalization and spelling.

Prior Knowledge

• Identify individual lifestyle needs and wants.
• Identify possible educational and career choice with corresponding income.
• Formulate a personal spending plan for age 28.
• Make decisions; solve problems.
• Spend and save money wisely.
• Add and subtract with or without a calculator.
• Write checks properly.
• Reason, evaluate, and communicate about personal spending choices.
• Identify their own abilities and interests as possible guides to career choice.

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