Plan a Food Truck: Project-Based Learning, Grades 3-5

Give your class a business of their own. In this sixty-page pack for third, fourth, and fifth graders, teams take on a two-week project that starts with a letter from the principal: the school fair needs food, and each team has a $2,500 startup budget to open a food truck. Over two weeks, teams pick a food theme, give their truck a name, write a slogan, sketch a logo, put together a menu of eight dishes with prices, work out what each dish earns, ask twenty customers what they like, design a poster and a flyer, map out the truck's day, and show their truck off to the class. The math is real, and it is woven into every step. Students add combo totals and make change, multiply to check budget lines, subtract ingredient costs to find profit, and multiply profit by 10, 20, and 30 dishes to see how sales grow. A worked budget example shows one team's full plan, then students build their own budget and check that it stays inside $2,500. Survey pages turn tally marks into counts and comparisons, and a three-truck comparison asks which truck earns the most in a day. Beyond the numbers, the pack builds writing and speaking. There is a marketing poster planner, a flyer draft, a menu board, a daily schedule, a location map, food safety true or false, team roles, a fourteen-day timeline, a presentation planner, a practice checklist, a rubric worth sixty points, a self-assessment, feedback from classmates, and a pair of reflection journals. Vocabulary matching, a word search, a crossword, twelve word problems, two mixed reviews, and two ten-question quizzes round out the practice, and every student page carries a name and date line. Eleven pages of teacher-only answer keys cover every page, and the pack ends with a certificate. Just print and go — no preparation is needed.