Three great activities to play and learn about Hanukkah. Soda displays, Hebrew calendar, and relating two recipes for their healthiness.
Hanukkah is almost here! – 3 activities
Category: Holidays and Annual Events
Investigations that relate to regular annual events.
Thanksgiving, football, shopping and giving
Thirteen provocative activities for this holiday season of Thanksgiving, football, and shopping.
Veterans Day, 2023
Population and Density maps of where Veterans live. What can you observe? What do you wonder? How do they compare?
DST ends November 5th – strange happenings
In this activity students try to figure out how time settings will change as they move from place to place and what variables are involved in the daylight savings time shift. Day length? Latitude?
Yummy Pumpkin Pie
23 people are coming to my house for pumpkin pie and a hike. How many pies should I make? How much of each ingredient will I need? What quantities should I buy? Engage your students in estimation, multiplication of fractions and proportional reasoning.
14 ideas for Halloween
We have 14 great activities to use in your class as we near Halloween. Candy sales; Participation in activities; Creating a sheet ghost costume; Bats; Figuring chocolate volume; Dia de los meurtos; and more …
How many Americans (and their pets) participate in Halloween?
Surveys show that more and more people are involved in and spending on Halloween activities. If the percent of Americans participating continues at this pace and the population continues to grow at a smaller percentage, will all Americans soon be celebrating Halloween?
Vampire bats + Mosquito eating bats
Two activities. Vampire bats = We’ve given lots of interesting metric and customary unit facts and asked students to relate those sizes to more familiar objects. + Mosquito eating bats = Students compare a bat’s weight to how much he can consume in one night. They calculate how much they would need to eat to consume a comparable proportion of food.
Nobel Prizes
The Nobel Prizes have just been awarded. Alfred Nobel was a chemist, engineer, inventor, and businessman. He left most of his fortune to endow 5 prizes for “those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. How much money is awarded?
Indigenous Peoples or Columbus Day
Two activities – Students calculate how large Columbus must have thought the circumference of the Earth was if he reached the East India when he landed in the Bahamas + history of who lived there. In the second activity, students use latitude and longitude to analyze the distances Columbus’s trip involved.
Will this be an El Niño winter?
Students study charts that show variations from normal sea surface temperatures during El Niño years. They get the chance to more fully understand these events and understand the world-wide ramifications of an El Niño year.
Will sending you back to school this year cost a fortune?
In this activity students decide what equipment and supplies are necessary, estimate how much that will all cost, confer with classmates to refine their lists, and then research to find out more accurately how much it will probably cost to send them back to school. This activity could be used for students in upper elementary school all the way to high school. It offers an opportunity for kids to estimate, research, reason, calculate and communicate with each other.
Ice Cream Day – July 16th
We have two timely activities … Updated! All the ice cream that you can eat All the ice cream that you can eat for only 10 cents! Wow, that’s a great deal! How great a deal was that? The history…
The 4th of July
Flag art, creating a 5-pointed star with one cut, fireworks on your calculator, hot dog eating contest, and a possible new, 52-star flag.
Summer Solstice, the longest day
In this activity, students compare length of daylight to place latitude while studying the correlation, evaluating Excel generated formulas, and appreciating the significance of this date.