Brian has spent too much time thinking about his leaf raking. He's worried about doing the job alone and thinking about how long the job would take with different numbers of rakers.
In this activity students see the inverse relationship between number of workers and time to complete the whole job. They graph hyperbolas and consider how long the extreme condition of zero people raking might take to complete the job.
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An interesting intro to this activity might be this Youtube explanation that a young man presented about standing on the boarder of Navajo and Hopi reservation and time weirdness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvSfN-rnsAA&t=20s
In this activity students try to figure out how time settings will change as they move from place to place and what variables are involved in the daylight savings time shift. Day length? Latitude?
The activity: DaylightSavingsTimeConfusion2021.pdf
The Day of the Dead is always on the first and second of November. Life and death are part of the natural cycle of life and the Dia de los Muertos honors that cycle. Peppery Mexican hot chocolate is part of the annual festivities.
In this activity, students learn a little about the holiday and calculate the expense of a Day of the Dead celebration in their classroom.
The activity: SpicyMexicanHotChocolate.pdf
How well can you predict your candy haul? - Students consider how to determine their best predictions of their candy haul. The math ideas of measurement error and percent error are introduced. Students then predict their own Halloween candy collection numbers and compare their predictions to their actual haul using measurement and percent error.
Make a ghost costume from a sheet - In this activity young students can reason about the potential of a sheet, cut in a very defined circular shape, becoming a Halloween ghost costume. Notions of head diameter, sheet length, less than and greater than will all come into their reasoning.
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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 more useful for 5th or 6th graders or include the whole activity to challenge with a little bit of percent work.
We've also added a Halloween bucket volume for yet another challenge. bucket-pic.pdf
Let your students marvel at World Record winning giant pumpkins as they use proportions to calculate the quantities of pumpkin puree and the number of pumpkin pies that could be made from one of these giants. To introduce the task you might show this cool time lapse video of a giant pumpkin from planting to harvest.
