A Simple Plan

I am one of the teacher advisers for the school's student council. Our student council has students in grades 5-6 up through high school. A few years ago we experimented with having students in the grade 3-4 class join, but that lasted one year.

FreeHand ROSES by aungkarns

Every year we sell roses to the entire school community. The ordering process starts with a [paper] letter sent home with a [paper] order form. The students and staff then bring back the order forms and they go into either of the teacher advisers' boxes. Then the orders need to be tallied, sorted, and the money collected needs to be checked.

This year the letter to be sent home was sent out late. We were not going to make the flower shop's ordering deadline so we needed to estimate what people might order by looking at last year's order.

I picked the flowers up from the flower shop the evening before we were to pass them out. We counted them the following day and it turned out that the number of flowers we ordered was short despite having a surplus for the last few years. We were to we needed to get to the flower shop in the middle of the school day to pick up more flowers.

When I got back I was very relieved and felt that it was all over. Then I started to hear about orders not being filled and filled incorrectly. I ended up adjusting orders by taking flowers from teachers to replace the colors that were missing. We were still short on flowers, but many teachers were not concerned with getting their full orders.

There are many things I could have done differently to ensure success: getting the letter out on time, helping the high school students get organized before counting, and making sure the orders were double-checked before being sent out to name a few.

I was still surprised the high school students were not able to do the counting and sorting on their own. So maybe what I could have done differently starts in my classroom. Maybe I should be exposing my students to more situational, multistage problems like this where they have to use skills like tallying, sorting, adding, checking, and estimating. 

The solution starts much earlier - all the way back to first grade.