Here is our brief for today: every pupil puts in €8, and there are 28 of us. We are planning a class celebration to mark the end of primary school. Before we can spend a single euro, what is the very first thing we need to decide?
On screen is a celebration budget in three steps: the spending cap, a bulk discount on the food, and a fair share of the activity cost. Notice the running balance after each cost.
Today we plan one celebration together on the board. We will call out categories, enter an amount for each, and keep one eye on the progress bar. Our job is to stay at or under the €224 cap while still feeding everyone and having something fun to do.
Now copy this worked plan into your maths copy to practise the layout. This is a fresh example to work from, not the plan we just built on the board. Write each category on its own line with its cost and its share-per-pupil beside it. Total the four costs at the bottom, then write how much of the €224 is left.
The first share is done for you so you can see the method — divide each cost by 28 to find the share:
Today you design your own celebration plan within the €224 cap. Spread the money across food, drinks, decorations and an activity so nothing is left out and the total stays under the cap.
If you'd like a real challenge, swap one item for a cheaper option and work out how much you saved as a percentage. Here is how to find a saving as a percentage: you take the amount you saved, divide it by the original price, then multiply by 100. For example, if you swap a €50 item for a €40 one, you saved €10. So €10 ÷ €50 = 0.2, and 0.2 × 100 = 20% off.
All four costs came out of the same €224 fund, so trimming any one of them by a euro frees exactly that euro. When the budget got tight, which items felt like things we really needed, and which were nice-to-have extras we could cut without spoiling the day?
Next we step back through the whole year's maths journal, choose the pieces we are proudest of, and reflect on how our thinking has grown across primary school.
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