Investigations that relate to regular annual events.
On Wednesday, January 4, 2017, 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…
On Saturday evening, December 31st, 2016 at 12:59 pm, much of the world will be watching the iconic Times Square Tower’s New Year’s Eve ball drop 141 feet to the roof of the One Times Square Building in Manhattan, NY. This…
Christmas tree lights – Students first guess how many feet of lights would be required to decorate this tree. The class finds the mean and median of those guesses. Then they brainstorm and refine their guesses. Lastly they figure out how…
In my family it is traditional to eat latkes (Yiddish for potato pancakes) at this time of year. They are fried in a lot of oil and salted generously. My mom’s latkes were wonderful but they couldn’t have been good for…
Dr. Sara Santos is a popular mathematician and speaker on mathematics. She has worked out a method for wrapping boxes (rectangular prisms) as efficiently as possible. (Watch the video above) Her method was written up in this article in Mental Floss and…
I have to wrap this box. In this problem based activity students first guess and then try to calculate whether they will have enough paper to wrap this present without taping pieces of wrapping paper together. …with this wrapping paper …
Check out our Christmas Tree. You need to buy lights for the tree. Without calculating, guess how many feet of lights you will need.What information do you need to better estimate the number of feet of lights that you need?…
Each year the Boston Ballet highlights the holiday season with the Nutcracker ballet. In 2014, the Boston Ritz Carlton Hotel’s chef, Andrew Yeo and his pastry team, created a gorgeous and massive Nutcracker cake of macaroons and fondant to celebrate the…
We spend a lot of money as consumers in the U.S. In this activity we look at historical data to see if there are any patterns in our spending. How does our holiday spending show up in these graphs? What…
Construction This is a 3-act activity about an annual display of creativity, engineering, and design as artists contribute cans of food for the shelters and food banks of their city. Students analyze, look for patterns, discuss solutions, and finally quantify the number…
As we get ready for next week’s holiday, students can study a map of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, describe, measure and hypothesize why this route was chosen and then calculate how long each band will be marching and…
As Veterans Day approaches, let your students learn about and appreciate the meaning of the day by analyzing the powerful data that we’ve supplied. Students can use our numbers to create questions for their classmates … questions that can emphasize the tremendous gift…
How many houses can you get to – It’s Halloween. Time to trick or treat. How long will it take you to get to all of these houses? This is a very open-ended task, counting, trick or treating strategies, distance and more.…
Clicking on any of the above images will open the image larger in a new window. We found big mixed bags of candy at really good prices … we think. Students are asked to decide which would be the best deal…
Use your student’s Halloween enthusiasm to do a study on volumes. We’ve created an activity that asks students to calculate the volume of candy containers that are silly and intriguing. Skip the cone and the sphere to make this activity…
