Thirteen provocative activities for this holiday season of Thanksgiving, football, and shopping.
Thanksgiving, football, shopping and giving
Tag: 5.NF
How many Americans (and their pets) participate in Halloween?
Surveys show that more and more people are involved in and spending on Halloween activities. If the percent of Americans participating continues at this pace and the population continues to grow at a smaller percentage, will all Americans soon be celebrating Halloween?
Will I have enough stuff?
We have 2 activities for National S’mores Day. (1) Number of ingredients to buy with no waste for all of my guests! (2) Building the largest S’more ever. What is reasonable.? How many marshmallows are in this recipe? How many people could this cookie feed? How many marshmallows could you eat?
Earth Day actions for our planet
We have 16 activities that you could use for Earth Day! Saturday, April 22nd is Earth Day. Help your students become activists for our planet? We have 16 activities that support recycling, conserving resources, awareness of climate change and protecting our planet.…
Spring and Easter ideas – 6 activities
Dyeing eggs with food coloring – Students use the chart on the back of a food dye package to compare the strangely different recipes listed for coloring a cake, icing, or dyeing eggs. They look for and create equivalent ratios…
Passover starts on Wednesday
Two activities involving fraction halving, doubling, and tripling operations with recipes for Passover. Students end up creating a huge matzo ball.
The Algebra of Magic Squares
Students examine Magic Squares for how they could help with math computation practice and having fun.
Whole lot of cookies
Jennifer Fairbanks from Hopkinton, MA sent us this picture of the cookies that she baked in 4 hours using 13 eggs and 5 cups of sugar. Do you see some math here?
Buy, buy, buy and ship (8 ideas)
Here comes Black Friday, Small business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday. It’s a crazy time of year. Use all of that shopping to educate your students about good deals and how shoppers can be fooled. Is this really 70%…
Mardi Gras, 2023
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.
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?
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?
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…