Checkout Challenge

Checkout Challenge
(Improving mental calculations)

There's several ways you can do this, either with one child at the front of the class or with groups of children all competing together. The basic idea of the activity is can the children be a checkout! The teacher (or another child) says what is being purchased, for example 'Mars Bar 32p', and the 'checkout child' mentally adds the price of the new item to the running total that they're keeping in their head.

The choice of prices allows it to progress from a very easy activity (where each item is priced between 1p and 10p and the final total is less than a pound) to a very challenging one (where the children have to keep quite big totals in their heads and add on prices of over one pound).