These posts help students see patterns and relationships.
Powerball and MegaMillion jackpots are growing all the time. Having a terrible chance of winning nearly a BILLION dollars might be a context that engages your students. Examine compound probability to decide if playing Powerball is worth it. As part…
Wow! Look at that score! There were some scoreboard malfunctions in this December 15, 2020, pre-season game. What might have been the final score if this game progressed at this rate? The activity: Celtics&76ers.pdf
The date of the Presidential Inauguration this year can be written in an interesting way. What do you notice? What do you wonder? Do you think that this happens often in a year?
We have 6 activities on Martin Luther King and the movement to a more fair and equal representation of Black lives in America. A timeline of KIng’s life; a timeline of the social justice movement; the history of Jackie Robinson; data on which monuments in the National Mall are most visited; a study of crowd counting; and an examination of the recent changes in the Bears Ears Monument size and the reasons for that change.
Start 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…
On Saturday, January 2nd, 2021, Earth will be as close as it gets to the Sun during its orbit. Shouldn’t that make this the warmest time of the year? In this activity students become familiar with the terms perihelion and aphelion as they calculate…
Point of view – With any set of cubes, enjoy building this creation using our two view-point pictures. How many blocks are in my stack? What is the least number of blocks that I used? The most number of blocks that I used?…
Do I have enough wrapping paper? – Students estimate the size of a gift and decide if the given wrapping paper is going to be enough. Finally they try to create a rule for determining enough wrapping paper from the dimensions of…
This would be a good date to play with Pythagorean Triples. Pythagorean Triples and coloring – Pythagorean triples are not only handy for students to recognize but produce some interesting and lovely patterns. We’ve combined a little coloring with our Pythagorean…
Right now, just after sunset, in the southwest sky, you can check out the planets of Jupiter and Saturn as they get closer and closer to each other. They are millions of miles apart but they appear to be very…
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.
The holidays are coming! We found these timely soda displays made up entirely of 12-pack of Coca-Cola products. What questions do you have? Clicking on either image will show them larger in their own windows. Start out the activity by…
Note: This is a remake of our 2014 and 2017 activities “How Much Does a Lego Cost?”. How much could the Roman Colosseum Lego set cost ? Student first make a guess and then think about what information would be…
How should I cook my turkey? – Students judge timing, cost, tastiness, and quantity necessary as they plan for the feast. 4.MD.1, 5.NBT.7, 4.MD2, 6.RP.3, 6.NS.3, 7.NS.3 Great video on a deep frying fire with William Shatner. Lots of Cranberries – (new) In this…
