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We’ve added a new way to find great activities for your classes. The link to this page, Bird’s Eye of Activities, is located on the left sidebar right below Home and About Us.
Oscars 2012
Students develop their own ideas about compounded percent change while they have the opportunity to speak about the upcoming Academy Awards show.
Worldwide box office income is compared for the top ten grossing movies of all time. Inflation rates are used to let students calculate how the money of 1997 compares to the money of 2011. The idea of this comparison is to encourage students to develop their own understanding of exponential growth.
This activity is accessible to students as young as 5th or 6th grade once they have familiarized themselves with computing with exponents and percents. The activity is appropriate for students in middle school or even high school as students generalize a formula for finding the adjusted for inflation earnings of any movie.
CCSS: 7.NS.3, A-CED.1, F-LE.1, F-LE.2
For members we have Word docs, an Excel sheet and solutions.
movies2012.doc oscars.xlsx movies2012-solution.pdf
Two more Oscar’s related activities: You can also use our last year’s activity, Movie ticket prices over time or this year’s January post, Do the best movies make the most money to bring the excitement of the Academy Awards into your classroom.
Throwing up again
Anchorage, Alaska has received more than 100 inches of snow this winter. The height of the tunnel to people’s homes is getting higher and higher. When they shovel an area, they have to throw the snow practically straight up from their path to get the snow well into the surrounding snowbanks.
In this activity students experiment with graphing parabolas and manipulating those equations to try to establish a likely trajectory for a snow-throwing arc. Finally they decide how far someone will have to Throw Up.
For members we have Word docs and solutions.
throwing-up2012.doc throwing-up-solutions2012.pdf
CCSS: 8.F.5, A-CED.2, A-REI, G-MG.3
Presidents Day
Monday, February 20th, is Presidents Day. We honor presidents, veterans, purple heart recipients and sell cars. Is there more to Presidents Day? Students can learn a little of the history of the day while they check out how much various presidents have earned and try to create a graph of this very strange salary schedule … no cost of living increases … ever.
Then they learn a little about the Consumer Price Index as they calculate the value of those salaries in today’s dollars.
For members we have Word docs, Excel sheets, and solutions.
Presidents-Day.doc president’s-salaries.xlsx Presidents-Day-solutions.pdf
CCSS: 6.SP.4 and 5, 7.RP.3, 7.EE.4, 8.F.4 and 5, A-REI, F-IF.4
Four Valentine activities
For Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, we have four different activities that you can use in your classroom.
- Sweetheart Candies - Explore unit measure with sweet little hearts.
- Valentine Cardioid - Do some art in your math class.
- Chocolates - Discover the surface area of 3 irregularly shaped candies with a grid and/or the mean radius area method.
- Holiday Candy Sales - Use percents, ratio tables and pie charts to estimate candy sales.
Chocolates
Valentine’s Day is here again and that means candies and chocolate. In this activity students approximate the volume (through finding surface area) of three different pieces of chocolate. The chocolates are shaped like a heart, a bat (for Halloween) and a chocolate turtle irregular shape.
Consider showing students our pictures of the chocolates either on paper or through an LCD projector from our site. Ask students to consider how they might determine which piece of chocolate contains the largest amount of candy. Give students a few minutes to think about the problem and then have them pair up and discuss strategies with a partner. Facilitate a whole-class discussion on how they could get a good estimation of the surface area for each chocolate.
Hopefully a student will offer (or you may need to lead the conversation to) finding the area by laying a square grid over the chocolates. By counting whole and partial squares students are working with the concept of area and thinking about area as a measure of covering. You can use our chocolate-grid sheet, which has a grid laid over the chocolates.
Another possible way to find the area of the chocolates is to use the mean radius method. See our solutions document for more on this. You might have students use both the mean radius method and the counting squares method. It will be interesting to see how close their areas are for each chocolate. No matter which solution method studnts use, consider having students report their thinking through a doc camera. Focus on student’s mathematical ideas and problem solving strategies. The concept of area as a measure of covering should be the theme of the sharing and class discussion.
You may also consider using actual chocolates of different shapes and sizes as a class activity like two of my colleagues and friends did in their classrooms:
CCSS: 3.MD.5 , 3.MD.6 , 6.G.1 , 7.G.4 , 7.G.6
Chocolate.pdf Chocolate-grid.pdf
For members we have Word docs and solutions.
Chocolate.doc Chocolate-grid.doc Chocolate-grid-solutions.pdf
Valentine’s Cardioid
WojciechSwiderski at the Polish language Wikipedia
Happy Valentine’s Day! cardioid.pdf
This PDF contains four ways students can draw cardioids for Valentine’s Day.
Sweetheart Candies
Here is your Valentine’s Day (Tuesday, February 14th) lesson. What more could kids want then Sweetheart candies, problem solving, critical thinking, and number sense reasoning. Enjoy!
For members we have solutions and Word documents.
sweetheart-candy2012-solutions.doc sweetheart-candy2012-solutions.pdf
CCSS: 6.RP, 7.RP, N-Q
Negative Exponents? Ugh
This activity/post is a little different than are usual posts. We look at a particular math concept and consider how to use context, models and CCSS math practices to increase student understanding. This activity focuses on negative exponents. Even if you aren’t teaching negative exponents, this is a great opportunity to look at non-linear growth or positive exponents.
We use examples of a plant and a beanstalk growing exponentially and ask kids to determine the height of these plants in the future (growing at the same rate). Students skip ahead several inputs and are forced to consider a rule to model the situation. Next we ask students to think about how they might work backwards. If you know the height of a plant during its 9th month, how can you find it’s height at the 8th and 7th months. Finally we ask them to consider how tall these plants were before they were purchased (again assuming that they were growing at the same rate). Students use this context to see the pattern of powers and develop an understanding of why positive whole numbers raised to a negative exponent result in a fraction (not a negative number).
For a suggested teaching approach check out Brian’s video below. You will notice that there is an opportunity to attend to CCSS math practice #7, “Look for and make use of structure” by creating a middle column (in the video) and purposefully complicating the math. This allows us to see the math in a different way and to get a better understanding of what is happening, mathematically, between the variables, time and height. At this point you will notice that students can engage in math practice #8, ”Express regularity in repeated reasoning“. When Brian generalizes the math that he sees happening over and over again in the table, he is abstracting from repeated reasoning.
For these reasons MP.7 and MP.8 really jump out in this activity (as they do in many of our activities). Make sure to engage students in this process. The process should not be completely teacher directed. Students might try the problems themselves and then follow up with guided, teacher directed, whole class discussion.
CCSS: 5.NBT.1, 5.NBT.2, 6.EE.1, 8.EE.1, F-LE.1
Fast-Growing-Plant.doc Fast-Growing-Plant.pdf
For members we have created solutions.
Fast-Growing-Plant-solutions.doc Fast-Growing-Plant-solutions.pdf
Four Super Bowl activities, eight NFL activities in total for your students!
Use the hype to motivate your students on Friday, Monday or Tuesday with one of our four activities on the Super Bowl.
There is plenty of math for everybody…
Super Bowl Numerals – Roman numeral fun. This is your chance to teach the kids about these funny looking numbers they see once a year!
Typical Super Bowl scores – mean, median, mode, range and the most meaningful measure of central tendency in each calculation. Rich open ended questions and problem solving using real data.
How has the cost of Super Bowl ads changed – Has the cost of a 30-second advertisement grown linearly, exponentially, or what over the last 45 years. Accessible and appropriate for anyone from 4th through 12th grade.
Cost of Super Bowl ads – scientific notation, cost per second and student’s opinions of the ads.
And how about some bonus NFL activities:
Losing Teams in the Playoffs A look at the worst teams (by regular season record) to ever make the playoffs in the NFL, NBA and MLB. Fractions, Ratios, Percent.
NFL Franchise Values A look at the actual value of each NFL team. Reading graphs and then looking at the concept of mean through fair sharing or redistributing. Concepts and authentic data… delicious.
Tebow Time? A look back at Tim Tebow stats by quarter in an effort to determine when is Tebow Time?
Fantasy Football A look at how to play one of America’s most popular games: Fantasy Football. Formula calculations, algebra expressions and stats… and football.
Facebook in the buzz again
Wednesday, February 1, 2012, Facebook filed forms to become a publicly traded commodity. It could be one of the most valuable IT stocks in the world. As a private company, Facebook could only have 500 shareholders. When Facebook goes public, it will be listed on the stock exchange and anyone, even you and I, can invest in it.
This is a great opportunity to use our recently updated post about Facebook’s growth.
facebook-growth2012.doc facebook-growth2012.pdf
Check out Mr. Taylor’s redesign of our Facebook activity
For members we have solutions and an Excel file with the data and graph.
facebook-growth2012-solutions.doc facebook-growth2012-solutions.pdf
CCSS: 6.RP.3, 7.RP.3, 8.F.4, F-LE, F-IF.6
Cost of Super bowl ads
Let your students practice using scientific notation as they calculate the incredible cost of Super Bowl commercials. After working with these costs, students share their memories of the ads, express their opinions about them and decide who the marketing was probably geared towards.
Newton teacher, Matt Timmins gave us this timely activity a few years ago and we’ve updated it.
super-bowl-ads2012.doc super-bowl-ads2012.pdf
For members we have solutions.
super-bowl-ads2012-solutions.doc super-bowl-ads2012-solutions.pdf
CCSS: 6.EE.1, 7.EE.1, 8.EE.1-4, N-RN,
Punxsutawney’s predictions
February 2nd, Punxsutawney Phil will again, with great ceremony, come out of his burrow and look for his shadow. There’s nothing like a cute animal picture to make your students smile as they calculate the relative frequency of Phil’s upcoming prediction.
CCSS: 7.SP.5 , 7.SP.6. , 7.SP.7
groundhog-day.doc groundhog-day.pdf
For members we have solutions.
How has the cost of a Super Bowl ad changed?
Brian has created one more Super Bowl analysis to motivate your students.
Students plot the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad over the past 45 Super Bowls. How has the cost of a Super Bowl ad changed over time? Has it grown linearly? Exponentially?
Students create a curve or line to model the data and make predictions of future Super Bowl ad costs. Excel or graphing utilities can be used to precisely model the data … a great way to integrate technology into your math class.
This could be a great activity to do in class the days leading up to or right after the Super Bowl, when everyone is talking about those commercials. You might also check out this page of videos of past popular Super Bowl commercials to go along with our activity. The page was made by Melanie Richey who is an 8th grade math teacher.
so-expensive-ads.doc so-expensive-ads.pdf rising-sb-ad-cost.xls
For members we have solutions for this investigation.
so-expensive-ads-solutions.doc so-expensive-ads-solutions.pdf
CCSS: 7.SP, 8.SP, F-LE
Typical Super Bowl scores
Do Super Bowl games tend to have typical scores? Are there usual point spreads between the losing and winning teams?
In Brian’s activity, students study historical Super Bowl data to reflect on average (mean, median, and mode) losing scores, winning scores, and range of scores. They are asked to judge which of these central measurements seem the most meaningful and explain their reasoning.
CCSS: 6.SP.2, 6.SP.5, 7.SP.4, S-ID.2
typical-super-bowl-score2012.doc typical-super-bowl-score2012.pdf
For members, we’ve worked out the solutions.
typical-super-bowl-score2012-solutions.doc
typical-super-bowl-score2012-solutions.pdf
