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…
Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007) was a an American artist involved in Conceptual art and Minimalism. This structure is housed in the garden of the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall. The activity: Four-sidedPyramid.pdf CCSS: 4.OA.C, 5.OA.B, 7.EE.B, HSF.BF, HSF.LE, HSM, MP5 Two related…
If you have a set of cubes for your classroom, this would make a great group hands-on project. Its an old puzzle but the activity deserves a revisit. Below are two straight-on images of my stack of blocks. Can you…
Act One: Check out this beach towel! What do you wonder? What would you like to know? Miami artist, Misael Soto (pictured on the left below), created this giant art project to make a statement about people sharing territory at the beach.…
Let your students simply enjoy coloring our designs or artistically play with the whole creation of Φ designs. Simply coloring our Fibonacci patterns might allow students to ponder the Fibonacci sequence (while they learn more about its beauty) and just…
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…
Bring a little art into your math class as you begin to use the Pythagorean theorem and your students first meet irrational numbers.
Probably most of us have heard of and even used hexadecimal color codes. Don’t you wonder why their number descriptions really make sense? In this activity we first ask students to color in our Golden Spiral by giving them the…
What do you wonder about these recipes for coloring? What would happen if I used the wrong recipe (i.e. cake mix instead of egg dying) for coloring my eggs? Do all of the recipes (cake, icing, and eggs) have basically…
Which Sweet Heart candies are the best deal? – Students decide which quantity of Sweet Heart candies is the best deal. Ratio tables, unit ratios, devising convincing arguments. 6.RP.2, 6.RP.3, 7.RP.2 Sweetheart Candies – unit rate and ratio activity using those little candy…
On Saturday evening, December 31st, 2017 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…
Let students explore the patterns of perfect squares and Pythagorean Triples as they analyze our piece of art and decide why the resulting construction looks like spiraling squares. For a finale they color their own spiraling triple. The activity: SpiralingTriples-activity.pdf
Lorenzo Quinn, an Italian sculptor, created and temporarily installed this piece of art entitled “Support” in Venice. Quinn used his own children’s hands to design this piece. His intention was to demonstrate our need of human support to ensure the…
Let your students experiment with their graphing calculators to create a nice fireworks display? We’ve written a brief activity that questions students about manipulating parabolas, adjusting their calculator windows, and helping them celebrate whatever. Or consider using Desmos or Geogebra to create these fireworks. Enjoy! Or…
Uh oh! How do you find the area of a heart? Get your students to help you calculate how many sequins you’ll need to order for this mother’s day class project. The activity: BejeweledMother’sDayCard.pdf Mother’sDay-card-blank – If you want…
