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Welcome to my math blog! The purpose of this blog is to help you stay informed about our learning and experiences that have taken place during our math class. I have also included links your child (and you) may want to use in order to supplement math learning in 5th grade.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Personal Financial Literacy: Personal Income Tax


I very much enjoyed today's lesson on personal income tax.  Yesterday, my classes had chosen a career and found the average salary for that career.  Today, we started chinking away at that salary by finding the income tax they would be due.


The Project-Based Unit (above) is very timely and used the 2016 Tax Brackets to make this even more pertinent.  To begin, I had students find 10% of their salary to take away for various payroll taxes.  Next, we began to find their income tax.  Now, this part of the lesson got a little touchy as every child had a different salary.  So, we all began in the same place.  We all had a salary higher than the 10% tax bracket, so we were all able for find 10% of $9225.  Then we had to subtract $9225 from our salary before heading to the next tax bracket.  In the second tax bracket, the salary goes to $37,450.  If students salaries (after taking out the $9225) were below this, then they took the difference and multiplied by 15%, it it was over, we had to find 15% of $37,450 and subtract again.  For some students, their salaries were finished after the 2nd tax bracket, but I did have a handful in each class that went to the 5th tax bracket!  These students were a little more self-paced and able to work without my immediate help.



After finding all of the taxes taken from all needed tax brackets, we added up our taxes (including payroll) to find the total amount taken from our gross income.  Then we subtracted the taxes from the gross to find our net income.  This was more painful than I thought, as I had students who have gotten used to not lining up the decimal when they multiply, so they didn't line up the decimal numbers when they subtracted.  It makes quite a difference in the answer!!!

We stopped at this point as we were out of time!  We will pick up right where we left off tomorrow!.

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