Bake it, deep fry it or barbecue it? When do I have to wake up to begin preparations? How long will the cooking take? How much will it cost? How many can I feed?
These giant beauties can be measured in handler height, taxi cab widths, stories tall, and bicycle lengths. What does that all mean? How big are these balloons. The activity: Macy’sNewBalloons.pdf
In this 3-act activity, students look for a pattern to count these cans. Canstruction is an annual event that takes place just before Thanksgiving in cities throughout the world to raise money and gather food for local food banks.
It’s Halloween and this is your neighborhood. How long will it take you to trick or treat at every house in your neighborhood? Possible conversation with students: How long will it take you to get from house to house? You…
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 Figure out why it works. Construct viable arguments Critique the work of others…
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…
Jodie Berman, a high school math teacher in Chicago, loves mathematics and loves to cook. We’ve created an activity based on her Monster Cake (composed of everything that Cookie Monster loves). This recipe is published in her blog, Binomial Baker, First,…
Act One: Drill bits are measured by the diameter of the bit in inches. The drill bits below are ordered left to right in increasing size. The numerators in the fractions have been blacked out. What could the numerators be? Explain your…
Who’s going back to school? – Students calculate the historical changes in U.S. population percentages of people who are going back to school and try to formulate reasons for these variations. 6.EE, 6.RP.3, 6.SP, 7.EE, 7.RP.3, 7.SP Does it pay to get…
Back to school spending is huge and students might not appreciate what it costs to send them back to, essentially, their job of learning. In this activity students decide what equipment and supplies are necessary, estimate how much that will…
No joke. Saturday was National S’more Day. Thanks to Maggie Hefferman, Newton, MA educator, for the idea of this post. To help you celebrate this strange new holiday, we’ve asked students to do a little math to help quantify…
If you have a set of cubes for your classroom, this would make a great group hands-on project. Its an old puzzle but the activity deserves a revisit. Below are two straight-on images of my stack of blocks. Can you…
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…
Revised! We’re watching another Stanley Cup playoff now. Will there be any really long games during the playoffs? In 2013, a Stanley Cup playoff match between the Bruins and Blackhawks went into 3 overtimes. People stayed up way too late…