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…
Wow! Look at that score! There were some scoreboard malfunctions in this December 15, 2020, pre-season game. What might have been the final score if this game progressed at this rate? The activity: Celtics&76ers.pdf
The date of the Presidential Inauguration this year can be written in an interesting way. What do you notice? What do you wonder? Do you think that this happens often in a year?
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.
Start this activity with: What do you notice? What do you wonder? How many inches of snow produced that pile? How much snow in volume is on top of the car? How much could that snow weigh? Students try to approximate the…
On Saturday, January 2nd, 2021, Earth will be as close as it gets to the Sun during its orbit. Shouldn’t that make this the warmest time of the year? In this activity students become familiar with the terms perihelion and aphelion as they calculate…
It’s a gorgeous ball, covered with Waterford Crystal triangles, shaped as a geodesic icosahedron. Every New Year’s Eve it descends in Times Square to mark the beginning of the new year. Students can take a closer look at this construction…
Point of view – With any set of cubes, enjoy building this creation using our two view-point pictures. How many blocks are in my stack? What is the least number of blocks that I used? The most number of blocks that I used?…
Do I have enough wrapping paper? – Students estimate the size of a gift and decide if the given wrapping paper is going to be enough. Finally they try to create a rule for determining enough wrapping paper from the dimensions of…
Students appreciate how their latitude effects the darkness of their late afternoon location as they study the earth’s tilt and the logic of daylight hours. Is latitude the central angle of the Earth? The activity: winter-solstice2020.pdf
Right now, just after sunset, in the southwest sky, you can check out the planets of Jupiter and Saturn as they get closer and closer to each other. They are millions of miles apart but they appear to be very…
Students use the National Weather System chart to gauge wind chill, examine the patterns that correlate increasing wind and/or decreasing temperatures, use wind chill numbers to estimate possible wind and temperature factors, and generally become familiar with this sort of interpolation and calculation.
3 Hanukkah activities; the amazing Hebrew calendar, soda menorah, and potato latkes. In the calendar activity, students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible mathematics involved in creating a calendar that aligns both the moon’s revolution about the Earth and the Earth’s revolution about the Sun.
