As the Halloween season begins, let your students play a spooky game. How does this work?
Students can play this game online at Ghost Whisperer Crystal Ball and then
This activity can be used with any grade level elementary through high school. Younger students might work with patterns, multiples and order of operations. Older students might work with systems of equations to prove how the Ghost Whisperer works.
Giancarlo Stanton and Wayne Rooney
Giancarlo Stanton and Wayne Rooney signed big contracts in 2016, paying each of them millions. Lets take a look at some of the world's biggest sports contracts from the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB and European Football (what Americans call soccer). We often hear about big player contracts, sometimes over 100 million or even 200 million dollars! But who makes the most per year? In this activity, with a twist on unit rate, students find the average pay per year or "unit rate of pay" for a collection of highly paid athletes. Students think about unit rate, proportionality, slope and the relationship between multiplication and division.
Ooooo. Scary! This is a slightly didactic activity on vampire bats. We've given lots of interesting metric and customary unit facts and asked students to relate those sizes to more familiar objects. Simply enjoy the season with this slightly creepy activity ... metric and customary units, size and weight comparisons, and blood-sucking bats.
LeBron recently left the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Los Angeles Lakers. Lebron is arguably the best player in the NBA and a tremendous addition to a team ... a real difference maker. He began his career with the Cavaliers, then moved to the Miami Heat, then back to the Cavaliers, and now he's moved to the Lakers.
In this activity students read graphs and use measures of central tendency as they compare the records of the Miami Heat, the Cleveland Cavilers, and the Los Angeles Lakers with and without LeBron. How many wins per season can we expect from the Lakers now that they have LeBron and just how many wins is LeBron worth? Give students some time to think about & discuss ways that we can measure LeBron's effect on the performance of a team. Here is a link to a video clip about Lebron moving to the Lakers that you might use to introduce the context of this activity.
We've just added a new page entitled "Our user's favorite activities" for another way of choosing an appropriate activity for your classroom. The link to that page is located under the dark gray menu. Enjoy!
Mathias Willemijns' 2,624.6-pound pumpkin
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.