The Danner Family's Three-Day Emergency Water Supply

Hook (5 min): Hold up the empty gallon jug and the empty quart bottle. Ask students to picture their own household going three days without working faucets and to guess, privately on scrap paper, how many of the big jugs their household would need. Do not confirm or correct any guesses yet.

Direct instruction (10 min): Introduce the planning rule used in this lesson's scenario: the fictional Danner family stores 1 gallon of water for each person for each day, covering drinking and basic washing, and their dog gets 1 quart a day. Model the first calculation on the board: a household of 2 people preparing for 3 days needs 2 x 3 = 6 gallons. Then model a conversion: 8 quarts is 8 divided by 4, which is 2 gallons, because 4 quarts make 1 gallon. Record both worked examples in a class supply table.

Guided practice (10 min): As a class, plan for a different practice household: 3 people and a cat that needs 1 quart a day, for 3 days. Work the two parts aloud with student input, with people needing 9 gallons and the cat needing 3 quarts. Take a thumbs-up, thumbs-sideways poll on the conversion step; if fewer than three quarters of thumbs are up, rework the quarts-to-gallons example with a drawing of four quart bottles filling one jug before moving on.

Independent practice (15 min): Students complete the eight-question handout individually. Circulate and watch question 4, where the division 6 divided by 4 produces the decimal 1.5, and question 8, where a money total is multiplied.

Closure (5 min): Collect handouts. Ask two or three volunteers to share one step a real household could take this week to be better prepared, such as checking how much bottled water is already in the pantry. There is no single right answer here; the goal is to connect the arithmetic to a habit.