Tell students they will be opening a restaurant. Explain that their menu and food must be appealing to customers and price-competitive with other restaurants in their area, then ask them to create their own restaurant menu, complete with pricing -- decimals -- and a promotional discount -- percents. Through guided inquiry, encourage them to find their own solutions to accomplishing this objective by benchmarking other menus on the Internet, or calling restaurant owners.
Your project should explicitly focus on what students are to know and be able to do at each grade level. In sixth grade, students typically learn to divide fractions by fractions, connect the ideas of ratios and fractions, multiply and divide multiple-digit decimals, and find percents and wholes, given percents and parts. In seventh grade, they start to recognize decimals, fractions and percents as different representations of rational numbers, build on what they have learned about fractions to perform basic operations with rational numbers, and use their understanding of ratios and proportions to solve percent problems.
Use activities for your project that further students' progress toward the class' learning goals. Be creative, but keep your activities grounded in the true-to-life restaurant theme you have created. For example, have students pretend to be customers, order food from other students' menus, and calculate how much they owe after the discount and a tip. Alternatively, have students create a recipe as a class and divide ingredients to make a batch of something, and then divide the batch into individual portions. Whatever you do, remember the activity is not the goal. The goal is learning about fractions, decimals and percents.
To evaluate students' progress toward their learning goals, consider how the knowledge and skills they are learning might be demonstrated in an actual restaurant and try to simulate these authentic assessment points. For example, have students use fake money to pay a bill with a 15 percent discount and then add an 18 percent tip on the original bill amount. How would a waiter respond to an underpayment? Guide students in assessing each other's progress when appropriate.