The President’s have only received a pay increase 5 times in the United States. Picture it with a step graph. Calculate the actual salary using the CPI (Consumer Price Index). Do the Presidents need a raise?
President’s Pay for Presidents’ Day
Category: Math and Social Studies
Lunar New Year 2019 – Year of the Pig
Year of the Earth pig Lunar New Year begins on Tuesday, February 5th. This will be the year of the Earth Pig. The year name is a combination of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches creating a sequence of…
Martin Luther King, Jr. (4 activities)
Data on the National Mall sites – Two data analysis activities about the National Mall. Who do we honor? – What people or events are included in the National Mall monuments? Students use fractions or percents to decide what they can notice…
Times Square Ball Drop
Share the data in your class and ask what the numbers make your students wonder and what they can observe from the information. Happy New Year!
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…
Egad! It’s already time for Hanukkah
Sunday evening, December 2nd, is the first night of Hanukkah this year. I think it was much later in December last year. Why isn’t it always on the same date? Students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible…
Consumer spending 2018
Consumers in the U.S. spend a lot of money. 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 accounts for…
Veterans Day 2018
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…
Debt and deficit
The growing deficits of our government and accumulated debt are constantly in the news. Allow your students to investigate these concepts and their causes with this timely activity. The activity involves reading charts, making comparisons, computing percents and analyzing trends…
How huge could this mid-term election be?
Will November 6th election bring record number of voters to the polls? Students get a chance to understand what the usual percentage of voters is, look for trends and central tendencies, and make predictions about this year’s voter turnout. The…
Daylight Savings Time weird happenings
Daylight Saving time is controversial, disruptive, useful, saves energy, increases energy consumption, is inconvenient … Imagine locations where neighbors are differentiated by one or two hours and experiment with what it might be like to live in a neighborhood of…
Columbus’s progression across the Atlantic
The Niña Columbus Day is a bit of an enigma that used to be celebrated throughout all of the Americas. Indigenous people were not treated well by the European colonization that began with Columbus’s voyage. For that reason, many U.S.states…
Does it pay to get educated?
Updated! Why should students do well in school, graduate high school, or go on to college? In this activity median earnings by various education levels are explored. Students compare the earnings of a non-high school grad with workers who graduated…
Talk like a pirate day – viral growth
Talk like a pirate day is September 19th. Bring some humor and marketing understanding into your class with this activity about a silly holiday that has had viral growth. What happens when you tell 5 people and then each of…
Nike’s latest bet
Nike has just chosen a surprising person to represent the 30th anniversary of their slogan, “Just Do It”. Colin Kaepernick, past quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, has been a subject of controversy since 2016 when he “took a knee”…