Thanksgiving, football, Black Friday, and giving

Sour Cream Mashed Potatoes; Ina GartenNot enough mashed potatoes - Use Brian's famous mashed potatoes recipe to practice changing decimals to fractions; calculating ingredient measure for various-sized Thanksgiving gatherings; have students explain their reasoning; and to have students figure out how many servings 7½ pounds of potatoes would make. 5.NF.6 , 5.NF.6 , 6.RP.1 , 6.RP.2 , 6. RP.3 , 7.RP.1

4th down - Should you punt kick or go for a field goal? This is two activities. One is on graph reading. This is perhaps suitable for younger students. The other activity is on data analysis and the creation of the chart shown to the right.  7.NS,  7.SP.C.7,  HSS.MD.A.2,  HSS.MD.B.5,  HSS.MD.B.6,  HSS.MD.B.7

Watson SavesBenjamin-Watson - Watch the video with your class and use our activity to motivate students to figure out who ran a greater distance by using the Pythagorean Theorem.  In the video Teddy Bruschi says that Watson must have ran about 120 yards, maybe even more. Use the video and/or our activity to see if Teddy’s estimate is about right. 8.G.7, G-SRT.8

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Black Friday Deals

Black-Friday-Deals1

When shopping next Friday, students will be able to add some understanding and analysis to the trip after calculating savings in dollars and percents with this timely investigation.

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Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade 2018

As we get ready for next week's holiday, students can study a map of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, describe, measure and hypothesize why this route was chosen and then calculate how long each band will be marching and at what time they will arrive at the finish.

Students even approximate the volume of two parade balloons including Pikachu from this year's parade, and the 2013 Wizard of Oz balloon. Very fun and timely with lots of Common Core standards addressed.  Try the whole activity or any of the different tasks in the activity with your class.

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Fine

TJ Watt was fined for roughing the passer.  Check out the tweet from Darren Rovell and engage your students in a familiar context for a classic percent problem - solving for the "whole."

The activity: Fine.pdf

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Consumer spending 2018

Clicking on this image will show it larger in a new window.
 Graph from Wolfram Alpha

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 spikes or drops in spending?  What patterns do you notice?  Which patterns will likely continue and which patterns won't?   Let the class see, think, wonder and discuss in this timely activity.

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