HuckleBerry
Center for Creative Learning
Cynthia Kimura
Cynthia Kimura is a financial mentor guiding young minds towards a future of financial literacy and responsibility. With a passion for empowering students with the knowledge and skills to make informed financial decisions. She brings a wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm to her role as an educator with 16 years teaching experience.
Her journey into the world of personal finance began during her own childhood, where she learned the value of money through hands-on experience managing her savings at an early age. This exposure sparked her interest in financial education and planted the seeds for her studies leading to her degree in Consumer Science.
She has volunteered at Dr. William Buckner's Consumer Counseling Center, where she gained valuable experience working with individuals and families navigating through the complexities of budgeting and debt.
Cynthia has gained additional financial experience through her employment as an account for Pioneer Electronics. She became a real estate investor in 2009 and currently manages rental properties for her company. Cynthia is looking forward to creating a dynamic learning environment where students are encouraged to explore topics such as budgeting, saving, spending, and entrepreneurship.
By instilling financial literacy at an early age, Cynthia believes, we can empower students to make sound financial decisions, avoid debt, and achieve their short and long-term goals.
Projects In Math
Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Fractions & Measurement
Ages 7-10 years
Teacher: Cynthia Kimura
Homework: Yes, but just a little!
Prerequisites: Students need to have basic addition and subtraction skills through 100 and understand how to write out money equations.
It’s time to learn and practice all of your fundamental math skills! From addition and subtraction to multiplication, division, fractions, measurement and more! If your child ever asks WHY do I have to learn math, or just wants to have more fun with math, this is the class for you! We’ll be using projects and games that will both reinforce and teach fundamental math concepts. These projects incorporate 3rd-5th grade math standards.
Fall:
First we’ll start out with a little review work as we learn or re-learn all about decimals; place value, addition, subtraction, rounding and more through various lessons, worksheets and games. After that we’ll be budgeting! Each student will be assigned a monthly budget amount and then create a budget for housing, food, transportation, electronics and clothes! They’ll figure out how to save money, pick an item to save for and balance their budget! To do this, we’ll practice adding together 5 or more numbers (into the thousands place), subtracting 4 digit numbers, and multiplying by 12 to get a yearly amount. We’ll warm up each class with some skills necessary to complete our project, including learning all of our operations on decimals. Next we’ll design an Animal Sanctuary! In this project students will be learning about area and perimeter, practicing their addition, multiplication and measurement skills. We will need to adhere to a minimum size for animal enclosures and other project guidelines as they construct their sanctuary. They will need to feed the animals and the humans that want to see them, read weather charts, figure out if any of our animals are overweight and so much more! Let’s take care of these animals! Afterwards we will plan our own 3D Model Food Truck! We’ll continue with our measuring, area, perimeter and volume and come up with a full menu of our favorite foods! We’ll be taking orders, making change and more to practice all of that decimal math!
Winter:
We’ll start this winter with learning about fraction basics and then run our own Pizza Place! While we’re planning the perfect pizza, we’ll learn to represent fractions on a visual model, add fractions, interpret data on graphs, compare fractions and find equivalents. Afterwards we’ll go shopping and practice decimal multiplication and division! We’ll start with smaller numbers, but move into money multiplication where we get to practice moving those decimal places. Again, at the beginning of each class we’ll do a review of our skills to stay sharp on the mechanics of math. Our final project of this session is a County Fair plan. We’ll plan our rides, figure out elapsed time of our rides plus the amount of time we’re in line, do some more money math and more!
Spring:
Long division is a skill that needs lots of practice, but our Movie Marathon project will give us lots of opportunities to practice long division in a fun way! Students new to division and practice with single divisors and more experienced mathematicians can use larger divisors as we figure out average costs of snacks, length of movies, cost to run the theatre and so much more! We’ll leave time to devise our final project of the year as well as put together our final exhibition of math projects!