Flooding in San Marcos, Texas This year has brought torrential rains to Texas after years of severe draught. February was the coldest month ever in much of the midwest and Northeast US. Pakistan and India have experienced extreme and deadly heat waves. Use the open number line and our lists of temperature extremes to make signed number operations and absolute value sensible. Students compare record high and low temps (integers) and use absolute value in order to always find the positive… 1, 0
My dog, Jorge, on a cold, snowy and windy day. When the weather person talks about wind chill did you ever wonder how they calculate that number? In this activity students use the National Weather System chart to gauge wind chill, examine the patterns that correlate increasing wind and/or decreasing temperatures, use wind chill numbers to estimate possible wind and temperature factors, and generally become familiar with this sort of interpolation and calculation. Also check out this windchill… 0, 2
…Weather has been extreme in the U.S. lately. Use this incredible media topic to engage your students in integer subtraction, analysis, understanding, practice and confidence building. CCSS: 7.NS.1, 7.NS.3, MP2 The Activity: TemperatureChanges.pdf For members we have an editable Word docx and solutions. TemperatureChanges.docx TemperatureChanges-solution… 0, 1
Here are some pictures from a recent snowfall at my house. How Much Snow Did I Get? Have students make an estimate. Ask them for a guess that is probably a little too low and one that is probably too high. Ask students “What information would be useful to help figure out how much it snowed?” Answer – It snowed for 23 straight hours and we ended up with two snow days (no school). Have students use this info and the pictures in the slide show to make a prediction as to how many inches of snow… 0, 0
Texas, May 2015 Tornadoes have devastated the Great Plains of the U.S. in the last few days. Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Kansas have been brutally hit with these powerful events. Involve your students in a better understanding of the ranking and severity of tornadoes with this investigation. Students learn about the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF scale) and the usual locations and time of year when tornadoes are most likely to occur. They can begin to appreciate and analyze some of the… 0, 0
Students ponder the relationship between place latitudes and average January temperatures while they try to discover a correlation. Is this a linear or near linear relationship? … averaging, missing data for averaging, line of best fit, Google Earth, world locations, linear review, extrapolation … This lesson is chocked full of interesting mathematics and world awareness. cold-out.pdf For members we have Word docs, solutions and graphs. cold-out.doc cold-out-solutions.pdf CCSS: 6.SP.5,… 0, 0
It’s been a crazy winter of extremes through much of the United States. Here’s an article, from the February 17, 2016 Boston Globe Newspaper by Matt Rochereau, with the degree swing whited out. Have your students determine the temperature increase over those two days. First you might show students only the text of the article. Let them think a little, then talk a little. Then show them the graph with the text. Let them determine and discuss the temperature change as a class. After your… 0, 0
In 2010, March was so rainy that flooding was the topic of every newscast and many, many conversations. The picture shows how students went home from school in Wayland Mass. on March 31st – on a Duckboat. This two page investigation asks students to calculate the volume of water generated by inches of rain spread over the surface area of Massachusetts. Specific river catchment areas are then considered to understand the actual voluminous rise of the Sudbury River. Once the volume of water is… 0, 0
The official Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1 and doesn’t end until November 30th. Encourage your students to join the conversation, knowledgeably, by using Brian’s latest creation. Students read about hurricane classfications and calculate the possible increases in destruction from various scaled events. Estimation, data analysis with graphs to study trends, damage expense, average frequency, and histogram are all part of this lesson. CCSS: 6.SP.3 , 6.SP.4 , 6.SP.5 , S-ID.1… 0, 0
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… 0, 0
Click image to see larger. Start out this activity with: What do you notice? What do you wonder? How many inches of snow produced that pile? How much snow in volume is on top of the car? How much could that snow weigh? Students try to approximate the weight of the snow by using our snow water equivalent percents (SWE) and their own thoughts about how dense this snow might be. When they’ve calculated a weight or range of weights, we try to decide whether the car should have been flattened by… 0, 0
…This activity could be used as an introduction to trig ratios. Students figure out the approximate length of the huge branch that I have to fell for safety and firewood. After approximating the branch’s length, they calculate how many logs I will be creating and the time it will take me to cut it up. really-big.pdf For members we have an editable Word doc and solutions. really-big.doc really-big-solution.pdf CCSS: 7.RP, 8-RP, G-SRT, G-MG… 0, 0
…ng are some sites where we find tons of useful data that you can use in your own creations. http://www.the-numbers.com/ Good source of data on movies. http://www.vgchartz.com/ All the video game stats and data you could ever need. http://www.thorntonweather.com/ This site gives so much in the way of weather, climate and sever storm records and data. “Good” Infographics: http://www.good.is/infographics Infographics = data. This news site has infographics on a variety of subjects. Great for the… 0, 1
Mount Washington, NH Fall is a beautiful time of year for hiking. Many students will be walking in the woods and mountains to enjoy the colorful leaves and the cool weather outside. Let them combine what they are doing with their families and friends with a little mathematics about percent grade change. Why are there warnings about a 6% road grade change ahead? Why does everyone talk about the vertical gain on a trail that is only 3 miles long? Enjoy using slope and the Pythagorean Theorem in… 0, 1
…s post is about imagining sailing off into the West, into an empty looking ocean, to find what your captain believes is a good route to the Indian subcontinent? Sailing West was a huge navigational feat. Fortunately Columbus’s ships experienced good weather but they landed in the Caribbean … not southern Asia. Use some of what we know now about navigation to examine this trek and do some reasoning and experimentation with the data. For younger students you might consider using only the first… 0, 1
