What’s your guess? How fast are the number of daylight hours changing each day? Are the changes dramatic or subtle? Students make guesses; compute how long, on average, the change in daylight hours should be; and finally understand the variability in our year of daylight hours.
We have 6 activities on Martin Luther King and the movement to a more fair and equal representation of Black lives in America. A timeline of KIng’s life; a timeline of the social justice movement; the history of Jackie Robinson; data on which monuments in the National Mall are most visited; a study of crowd counting; and an examination of the recent changes in the Bears Ears Monument size and the reasons for that change.
In this timely activity, students learn about how cranberries are grown and harvested; estimate their size and quantities; and see what they can deduce from published statistics.
Here are two very different maps about where Veterans live in the U.S. and which states have the largest density of Veterans citizens. What do these two maps make you wonder or realize? How can you explain their comparison?
Students learn how the Postal Service is funded and try to decide how the USPS could earn more or spend less in their operation. They finally get to think about whether the post office should be a government run service or a self-sustaining business.
Giant hornets have now migrated to North America. In this activity students take the hornet’s measurements in millimeters and try to draw the hornet, life-sized, on centimeter graph paper. They learn a little more about the new beast.
Catching a productive meteor shower can be a stunning experience. On the evenings and mornings of August 11th, 12th and 13th there could be a very good show. A last quarter moon will leave the night sky growing darker each…
I risked infecting my friends or becoming infected myself by throwing a very small socially-distanced party. I served baked appetizers, disinfectant wipes, and latex gloves. I cooked while wearing clean latex gloves and served the appetizers with a spatula. The…
NASA and SpaceX plan to launch humans from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to the International Space Station for the first time since July 11, 2011. This is a more current events activity than mathematical.
How big is a coronavirus cell? How big is a micron? How well do these masks protect against the virus? What can you observe about the size of particles mentioned? Why are we wearing masks?
How much could this K-pop group possibly earn on Youtube and Spotify? Unit ratio calculations. BTS
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
We recently watched the approach of Hurricane Barry and worried about the fate of Louisiana. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, what would another powerful hurricane do to this fragile state? What is it about Louisiana that causes so much…
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…
With the start of summer and wonderful outdoor activities, it might be good to examine the growth of Lyme disease occurrences in the United States. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published maps for all of the…