Investigations that relate to regular annual events.
What’s your guess? How fast are the number of daylight hours changing each day? Are the changes dramatic or subtle? Students make guesses; compute how long, on average, the change in daylight hours should be; and finally understand the variability in our year of daylight hours.
Celebrated by 1/4th of the world’s population, Lunar New Year begins on Friday, February 12th. This will be the year of the Metal Ox. The year’s name is a combination of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches creating a…
As the Super Bowl approaches, engage your students with any or many of our football activities.
How often does Punxsutawney Phil get it right? Relative frequency! A cute animal will make your students smile as they calculate the relative frequency of Phil’s correct past predictions.
Introduce Roman numerals to your class. In this activity students learn the rules for evaluating Roman numerals, decipher copyright dates, see how Roman numerals are used today, and do some strange looking arithmetic and surprisingly easy computation.
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.
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…
It’s a gorgeous ball, covered with Waterford Crystal triangles, shaped as a geodesic icosahedron. Every New Year’s Eve it descends in Times Square to mark the beginning of the new year. Students can take a closer look at this construction…
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…
3 Hanukkah activities; the amazing Hebrew calendar, soda menorah, and potato latkes. In the calendar activity, students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible mathematics involved in creating a calendar that aligns both the moon’s revolution about the Earth and the Earth’s revolution about the Sun.
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…
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…
When shopping next Friday, students will be able to add some understanding and analysis to the trip after calculating savings in dollars and percents with this timely investigation.
