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…
Introduce Roman numerals to your class. In this activity students learn the rules for evaluating Roman numerals, decipher copyright dates, see how Roman numerals are used today, and do some strange looking arithmetic and surprisingly easy computation.
Brian has a lot of puzzles. His family must love working on them. What do you wonder about his puzzles? What do you notice? Make an educated guess, about how many pieces are in all of these puzzles? Can you…
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. Beware: the tasks in this activity involve some large numbers as well as some challenging fraction/ratio/proportion problems.
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 will cost 2.3 million dollars to shred 7 billion, previously printed, tickets in an attempt to reach a bankruptcy settlement at Chucky Cheese. Is that a reasonable amount?
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.
In 2018, the trailer of a truck filled with Ramen noodles was stolen from a parking lot in Georgia. The trailer contents were valued at $98,000. What do you wonder about this? Is this even possible?
Could $98,000 worth of Ramen even fit in a tractor trailer?
The Iditarod Dog Sled Race will begin this year on Saturday, March 7th in Anchorage, Alaska. It is often called The Last Great Race on Earth because it is so long and grueling. Students do some rate, distance, and hardship comparisons to decide…
This year we will add the 29th of February to our year? Why do we do that? How can you tell? What if we didn’t add a day every 4 years? Calendar math and flow charts.
What do you wonder? Why is this string of digits special? What will be the next number like this one?
Strange happenings when one neighborhood observes daylight saving time and one neighborhood doesn’t. Do you get confused? Does UTC notation help?
What’s the big deal with our deficit? Do we actually borrow money to cover our debt? If we do, imagine the interest charges? Help your students (and their families) understand the meaning and repercussions…
This weekend is the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markel. This will be quite an event and we can expect it to dominate the media. What have you heard about the event? What interests you? The mathematics in this…
Scoring Ski jumping – The scoring rubric for each of the Olympic events is intended to eliminate the possibility of scoring bias from the judges. Let your students learn more about the scoring of one event and decide whether it seems fair…