In New Orleans revelers throw and collect purple, green, and gold beads. Students get a chance to examine the monetary and environmental cost of this bead exuberance with our unit pricing and recycling activity.
Mardi Gras, 2022
Tag: 5.NF
Bowl by the hour or the game?
Students consider the posted pricing of this bowling alley. What must they consider when choosing how to pay? What do you expect will be the best deal? How do you know?
Halloween spending 2021
Use our current data on Halloween spending in America to engage your students in an analysis of the ratios and percents of population, participation, and money spent in honor of October 31st. This activity takes kids through finding parts of wholes as well as ratio, percents and proportion problems.
Chuck E. Cheese needed to shred
Chucky E. Cheese needed to shred 7 billion tickets at a cost of 2.3 million dollars. Was this the real cost of shredding them?
YUMMY food for Passover
Passover will begin this year at sundown on Saturday, March 27th. Jewish families will gather to commemorate the exodus of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The celebration begins with a traditional meal, the Seder, where the story of…
Not enough mashed potatoes
Updated activity for Covid 19 appropriate Thanksgivings.
Students change decimals to fractions,
calculate ingredient measures for various-sized Thanksgiving servings,
explain their thinking in calculating these figures,
and judge how many servings could be created from 7½ pounds of potatoes.
Monster cake
First, students need to find the surface area that the M&Ms cover in order to approximate how many M&Ms she needs to finish her cake.
When Brian tried to make the cake, he mistakenly added too much peanut butter. Now all the of ingredients will need to be increased by some percent to insure that the cake maintains appropriate ingredient ratios?
How much chocolate is left?
Fraction operations might be more interesting when it involves chocolate. Students reason and calculate what is left of these chocolate bars. The bars are the same size but are molded into different number of sections. Yum!
It might be a good year to see the Perseid meteor shower
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…
How fast will my new puppy mature?
There is a new dog aging formula that depends on methyl markers that adhere to the DNA molecules of living things. Now we know that dogs don’t age as we thought that they did.
Mixing colors with food dye
It’s time to dye eggs … or make a rainbow colored cake. Proportions, saturation, hue and shade.
Drill bit fractions
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…
How can Nike give away so much great stuff?
Worldwide Nike supports many teams and athletes. They design, manufacture, and supply gear for almost every sport imaginable. How much are those give-aways worth? Is the company going to go broke? Probably not. Nike is huge. In this activity we…
Pizza party figuring
In this activity students decide how to divide 2 pizzas amongst 6 adults and 3 pizzas amongst 8 kids. Fractional pizza parts need to be drawn and considerations discussed about which fractions are greater. Students interpret a fraction as division…
Super Bowl cheesy pretzel poppers
… A little more delicious work for the Super Bowl. Students follow a recipe that involves “cutting the cheese” block, figuring how many servings, estimating how many times they need to multiply the recipe by to make enough pretzel bites, and…