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 of the Dairy Queen franchise began with this ad in Illinois in 1938. I know…
All-you-can-eat ice cream … 10 cents!
Category: Math and Food
Get ready for Father’s Day
How much water should you be drinking?
As outdoor activities get into full swing and the temperatures rise, it might be a good time to look at hydration. A healthy requirement for fluids can’t really be the same for everyone. Surely the amount of water that you…
Bring Mothers’ Day math to your class!
Mother’s Day by the numbers – Mother’s Day is right around the corner and this means big business for the greeting card and floral industries. Let your students practice averages, percents, and large numbers while they analyze the statistics on Mother’s…
Chocolate everything – Yum!
Just before Mother’s Day we thought a lot of chocolate play might be timely. Big Snickers bar – 3-act task; How much bigger than a regular Snickers bar is that? CCSS: 4.MD.A, 5.MD.C, 6.G.A, 6.RP.A, 7.G.1, 7.G.6, 7.RP.A
Earth Day – 12 possible activities
Monday, April 22nd is Earth Day – There is so much to bring to your classroom to support recycling, conserving resources, studying climate change and protecting our planet. Have you seen more Monarch butterflies lately? – Students read charts, do a little research, and make observations…
Passover and Easter are almost here
6 activities! Peeps – Students estimate the number of Peeps sold each Easter season. They consider reasonability by making guesses they think might be too high and too low. Students determine necessary info, problem solve and improve their original estimates. They conduct random samplings…
Huge Key Lime pie
More for π Day! On a cold and snowy day in Boston, two chefs created a huge Key Lime pie to remind the frozen people of the Northeast how tasty and warm the Keys of Florida are. After you…
How big of a crepe can you make?
At Costco you can buy this huge tub of nutella. It contains nearly 7 pounds of chocolaty-hazelnut spread. We use nutella to make banana/nutella crepes. How long will that tub last us? Is it too big and we will have…
Value of a lifetime of Whoppers?
Locked in a smelly bathroom for one hour and then promised a lifetime of Whopper meals, an Oregon man sued BK when the manager’s promise was withdrawn. How much money should he ask for in his suit? The activity: BurgerKingBathroomLawsuit.pdf
Valentine’s Day (11 possibilities)
Parametric graphing, heart area, chocolate volume, making a heart-shaped cake, pie charts of holiday candy sales, how many cans in a can heart canstruction, where do all of those flowers come from, best deal on bagged candies, making a cardioid … Valentine everything!
Two 12s or one 18?
Which should we order and why? Two 12-inch pizzas or one 18-inch pizza? Which will give you more pizza? More crust? Which is the better deal? Let’s do the math! The activity: more-pizza.pdf
Winter and holiday posts (16 great activities)
Winter Solstice – Students appreciate how their latitude effects the darkness of their late afternoon location as they study the earth’s tilt and the logic of daylight hours. 7.G.3, HSG.C, HSG.GMD.4, HSG.MG.1 – Updated for 2018! Soda Santa – First students guess too…
Weird wing prices
Clicking on this image will show it larger in a new window. Danny’s Wok in Philadelphia has a huge price list for ordering their famous chicken wings. Why did they write the prices this way? Do you see a pattern?…
Thanksgiving, football, Black Friday, and giving
Not enough mashed potatoes – Use Brian’s famous mashed potatoes recipe to practice changing decimals to fractions; calculating ingredient measure for various-sized Thanksgiving gatherings; have students explain their reasoning; and to have students figure out how many servings 7½ pounds of…