After chlorination, it has been hard to measure the quantity of pollutants in pool water. A Canadian chemist, Xing-Fang Li, has found a marker for urine that chlorine doesn't disguise.
In this activity, students calculate volume of several pools, change that cubic foot volume to gallons of pool water, and try to approximate how much urine is in each pool. You might kick this activity off with this silly clip from the 2010 movie Grown Ups, where Kevin James is caught peeing in the pool.
Sunrise on summer solstice at Stonehenge
On Friday, June 21st, at 11:54 am EDT, the Earth's North Pole will be tilted as far towards the Sun as it will ever be in the year. This marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the summer solstice ... a time that has been revered for centuries.
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.
Clicking on this image will show it larger in a new window.
All soccer players on a team aren't paid the same. The best players are paid more than the simply great players. And in Women's soccer those same differences exist but at a smaller income scale.
In this activity we examine some of the comparison data and let students decide how to best represent this disparity and analyze justifications for it. Great discussion post!
Thank you Mother and Father for all of those diapers
- Which is a better deal, cloth or disposable diapers? How much did you cost your parents in diapers? In the future how much could your kid's diapers cost? Help students realize all that mom and dad went through in buying and changing diapers.
Students will compare the cost of buying disposable versus cloth diapers. They estimate how much they cost their parents in diapers and consider how much they will spend on diapers when they have a baby. This is a great math activity for Father’s Day or during the study of linear equations and introduction to systems of equations.
There is quite a bit of scaffolding built into the activity for students who might have limited experience with linear relationships and equation writing. Depending on the experience of your students you might reduce the amount of work in the tables or omit some of the questions in this part of the lesson.
CCSS: 6.EE.9, 7.EE.4, 8.F.2, 8.F.4, 8.EE.8, HS.F-IF.8.B, HS.F-LE.2, HS.F-LE.5, MP7, MP8
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Father's Day Blueberry Muffins is a short activity that asks students to change the amounts in a blueberry muffin recipe to multiples of and fractions of a ¼ cup measuring cup (multiplication and division with unit fractions). CCSS: 4.NF.4, 4th, 5.NF.7, 5th, 6.NS.1, 6th, 7.NS.2,
Can you see the many spirals in this design?
Students calculate the size of each increasing round of squares and consider what sort of spirals these must be.
The activity: SpiralingSquares.pdf
Working with a little mathematical art is a great way to end your school year.
CCSS: 7th, 8th, HS, 8.G.B, HSG, HSG.CO
To see this poster larger in a new window, click on the image.
In 2017, Old Dominion Freight Line offered 2 free tickets to the next 3 World Series to the person who guesses closest to "How many baseballs are in this truck?". Alas, the contest ended on August 31st, 2017.
We've created a math activity so that students can reason and apply math to solve a true real world puzzle.
