Renting an Apartment: High School Life Skills & Applied Math

This How to Rent an Apartment Life Skills and Math Project teaches your high school students in consumer math, applied math, life skills, or financial literacy class all of the steps they need to take to be able to rent their first place: whether it's an apartment or house!

How to Use:

• The How to Rent an Apartment project includes six no-prep worksheets that go through ten steps for renting your place: from determining a budget, to getting good references, to arranging an apartment showing, to writing legible rent cheques, to getting enough renter’s insurance, arranging your movers, and more!

• Ten realistic applied math word problems about apartment renting (using percents and four operations with large numbers) are interspersed throughout the ten steps.

• Students will also get to practice writing a sample email to request to see a rental, and they will learn the simple steps of how to fill out a cheque with a realistic template that's included.

• Finally, your students will put it all together. They will determine a reasonable rental budget and look for three real, current rentals available in their local area.

• Optional: I have also included question prompts for a written reflection if you are looking for your students to think deeply about the entire rental process from start to finish, and what they have learned during the lesson.

Grades to Use With:

This real world math and life skills lesson is created for students in high school in a wide variety of classes:

• applied math or consumer math

• personal financial literacy

• life skills

• career and personal planning

Note: A grasp of 6th & 7th grade math skills (using percentages, four operations with decimals & large numbers) are required to complete the math questions.

What's Included: 8-Page PDF: Ready to Print and Use!

• Teacher Instructions

• 4-Page Student Worksheet: Ten Steps for Renting (with math questions)

• Student Worksheet for Researching Rentals

• Student Reflection

• Answer Key