Let your students experiment with their graphing calculators to create a nice fireworks display? We've written a brief activity that questions students about manipulating parabolas, adjusting their calculator windows, and helping them celebrate whatever. Or consider using Desmos or Geogebra to create these fireworks. Enjoy!
Or Flag Art!
I came home from work to find that my son had his cars organized in a tight parking lot on our front porch. How many cars are there? Is it an array and if so, what size array could it be or what arrays are possible? How many rows and columns? What is reasonable, how much is too much? Below is a video version of our power point for the activity, which guides the class through steps in the activity. You can use the video, just beware to keep stopping the video at key points as the solution appears at the end of the video.
HowManyCars from YummyMath on Vimeo.
Thank you Mother and Father for all of those diapers
- Which is a better deal, cloth or disposable diapers? How much did you cost your parents in diapers? In the future how much could your kid's diapers cost? Help students realize all that mom and dad went through in buying and changing diapers.
Students will compare the cost of buying disposable versus cloth diapers. They estimate how much they cost their parents in diapers and consider how much they will spend on diapers when they have a baby. This is a great math activity for Father’s Day or during the study of linear equations and introduction to systems of equations.
There is quite a bit of scaffolding built into the activity for students who might have limited experience with linear relationships and equation writing. Depending on the experience of your students you might reduce the amount of work in the tables or omit some of the questions in this part of the lesson.
Or check out:
Father's Day Blueberry Muffins is a short activity that asks students to change the amounts in a blueberry muffin recipe to multiples of and fractions of a ¼ cup measuring cup (multiplication and division with unit fractions).
Our Spring Sale was so successful that we've decided to create a similar Summer Sale for a few weeks.
Happy Summer to you all!
Brian and Leslie
In my grocery store they now have these new water bottle refilling stations. You can simply refill your own container with water instead of buying a six-pack of bottled water. Do you think that this is a good idea? Are they just giving away water? Is it the same quality of water as bottled water? What if you didn't bring a bottle or cup? Or if they provide cups, what about the cost of a cup. How many water bottles are they really saving?
This activity attempts to trace the pace of this plastic bottle saving device. How effective is it and is it worth the trouble? This is a great task for graphing, fitting lines and solving equations, all in an in important context.
Can you tell from its opening weekend how much the new movie, Wonder Woman, might earn in theaters? This activity can be used anytime and is especially timely when there is a new blockbuster movie released. We've left blank spaces in our chart for students to add their favorites or for future movies. The data for this activity can be found at: boxofficemojo.com. Just click on any movie and look for this info: 
Students compare "Opening Weekend" amounts to "Total Lifetime Gross (Domestic)" data to try to predict how much money the new Wonder Woman movie (which earned $103,000,000 in its opening weekend in the U.S.) will make at theaters. This task is accessible for any student who can plot points on a grid, so it could be used for students as young as 4th graders. Older students can create a line of best fit and equation to model the data and make predictions. By plotting and analyzing the data students decide if they can, in fact, predict the future.
