Exchange Rate

Student’s even teachers can’t wait until winter break, spring break, and most importantly summer break. During these times, people tend to go on vacations and visit places that they haven’t been to before. Speaking for myself, I try to go to a different country every 2 years. When going to a different country, the first thing we do when we get there is to exchange money for the trip. Not to forget that we are a boarder city, so our city does deal a lot with currency exchange. So I think it is really important for our students to learn how to deal with converting money. It is also part of the curriculum for the students to solve problems by using proportional reasoning in a variety of meaningful contexts. The specific expectation is to identify and describe real-life situations involving two quantities that are directly proportional. This is directly taken out of the grade 8 math curriculum. I am going to compare the Canadian to the American currency. For every $1.00 Canadian, the exchange rate is $0.80 American today. The reason why I brought up vacations at the beginning was to have students write all the countries they have been to and research what is the exchange rate between the Canadian currency and that countries currency today. If the students haven’t been to other countries, then they can pick places that they would want to visit in the future and to find the currency exchange rate. We can extend such lesson and ask the students to use their findings of the exchange rate to find the difference of prices in each country of five different groceries.