This year, Lucie has been attending a virtual school from home. We feel very fortunate that K12.com is a public school option in our state. One of the things we love about it is that we have time to come up with our own learning projects to supplement the already comprehensive curriculum that K12.com provides. This blog is one of our projects and today’s radish project was a way of incorporating math and consumer education into our vegetables. When we shopped for radishes on Sunday, we wanted to compare the price and quality of radishes available. We shopped for radishes at Whole Foods and Hy-Vee.

We decided to measure how much radishes cost per ounce and whether the quality varied based on the price.

We purchased the two bunches of radishes on the left from Whole Foods. These cost $2.00 per bunch and were labeled as “organic”. We purchased the two bunches on the right from Hy-Vee. They cost $0.99 per bunch. We purchased one bag of radishes, pictured below, from Hy-Vee at a cost of $1.99.

Now to weigh the radishes.We removed the leaves and roots from all radishes before weighing, but left them in the picture for comparison.

Whole Foods bunched radishes:

Hy-Vee Bunched radishes:

Hy-Vee bagged radishes:

Lucie made a table to help her compare price per ounce.  (I helped her get started and assisted with the calculator.)

Her calculations showed that the Whole Foods bunched radishes were $0.33/oz., the Hy-Vee bunched radishes were $0.22/oz. and the Hy-Vee bagged radishes were $0.12/oz. While we were working on her table, we talked about dividing dollars into cents and rounding to the nearest penny. Lucie was frustrated that she could not divide a penny into thirds, but was able to understand why she could not. We compared the appearance of the radishes. The Whole Foods radishes were the prettiest, the Hy-Vee bagged radishes were the second most attractive and the Hy-Vee bunched radishes were the least attractive, but not bad. We found no difference when we compared the taste of the three types of radishes.

I introduced her to Microsoft Excel and helped her make a table of  the different radish attributes and a bar graph comparing price.

Type of Radish	Cost per Ounce	Amount of Leaves	Appearance	Organic	Flavor
Whole Foods Bunch	$                     0.33	lots	best	yes	Great
Hy-Vee Bunch	$                     0.22	few	good	no	Great
Hy-Vee Bag	$                     0.12	none	better	no	Great

I asked Lucie to decide, based on her radish data, which type of radishes she would choose to buy and why she would choose that type.

Lucie’s response: “I would buy the bagged radishes from Hy-Vee. I want the lowest price and they all taste good. I would only care about how many leaves the radishes had if I had a pet rabbit who would like to eat the leaves. If I was making a craft out of the radishes, I would choose based on which ones were the roundest and the smoothest. I thought it was really fun to do a math calculation of radish prices and make a graph about them.”

Theo was interested in watching Lucie’s radish analysis and kept running through the kitchen to steal radish snacks.

Now, what were we going to do with all these radishes?

Thanks for visiting,

Jen