We are having a party!!!

Oh, the joys of planning a birthday party.  There is a reason that I had my boys 2 1/2 years apart, a party every 6 months!!  Ha! Just kidding, it just conveniently worked out that way.  Well, along with parties comes a lot food and treats.  To have your children help out planning, give them the math.  They are never going to use it again anyways, right?!
So, we have 20 adults and 8 kids.  We need to figure out how many hot dogs, hamburgers, buns, bags of chips, jars of pickles, boxes of jello, containers of whipped cream, drinks, size of cake, plates, napkins, forks, spoons, cups.........oh the list can go on.  This is what I hear,  "Mom, why can't you just go buy some stuff and call it good?"  OH!! I will tell you my dear.  "Why would I buy 14 bags of buns, when I need only 6?  So this is what you are going to do my love, you are going to figure how much we need?" "But, MAAAWWMMM!"  I think that is what most children would say, but not mine.  He would do math all day everyday.  He gets jealous that I have math homework and he doesn't!!
To incorporate math into real life as you see is quite easy.  At first I think that we could just do some estimation in regards to most of the items. Some of the adults will have a hot dog and a hamburger, most of the kids will either have one or the other.  (A nice chart would come in handy.)  We are a natural casing hot dog family, so knowing that they come in packages of 10, (we are not going to Sam's) how many packages do you think we should get?  For easy figuring we can round up to 30 guests.  30/10 is 3.  Three packages of hot dogs should be good.  Some of the items are not as easy to figure out, such as the chips.  We can still use estimation though.  We know by having thirty guests that we do not need thirty bags of chips, but four would suffice.  To get into depth a little deeper, and depending on the age, figuring out the serving size on the chip bags and multiplying that number by the amount of guests would get you even closer.  This system will continue on for all food and paper supplies.

Estimation and rounding in a party situation is a good plan, because you really will not know what people will want. 
For this to be used in my future classroom I will use this technique for any classroom parties.  We can use it for our fall party, if we have 24 students we can use estimation to figure out snacks.
Below is a cute, quick video that could be used in a classroom for lower elementary grades.