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. There’s a great high school extention that uses fractional exponents and logs to solve.
Egad, Hanukkah begins this year on Sunday evening, November 28th. I think it was in December last year. Why isn’t it always on the same date? Students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible mathematics involved in creating a…
14 Activities to bring some seasonal math to your classroom! Ways to cook a turkey; shopping activities; football stuff; and seasonal giving.
Students figure out the dimensions of these two new balloons using Macy’s hints and judging from the handlers’ sizes.
We used to see holiday sales right after Thanksgiving but, surprisingly, holiday shopping has already begun. Sales are advertised everywhere. Students will be able to add some understanding and analysis to those shopping trips after calculating savings in dollars and…
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?
In this activity students see the inverse relationship between number of workers and time to complete the whole job. They graph hyperbolas and consider how long the extreme condition of zero people raking might take to complete the job.
In this activity students try to figure out how time settings will change as they move from place to place and what variables are involved in the daylight savings time shift. Day length? Latitude?
How well can you predict your candy haul? – Students consider how to determine their best predictions of their candy haul. The math ideas of measurement error and percent error are introduced. Students then predict their own Halloween candy collection…
Use your student’s Halloween enthusiasm to do a study on volumes. We’ve created an activity that asks students to calculate the volume of candy containers that are silly and intriguing. Skip the cone and the sphere to make this activity…
Let your students marvel at World Record winning giant pumpkins as they use proportions to calculate the quantities of pumpkin puree and the number of pumpkin pies that could be made from one of these giants. To introduce the task…
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.
In this short activity, students decide if these two sales are the same. If not, which is better? How would you explain this to someone?
national debt What’s the big deal with our national debt? 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 of too much…
*** Two activities *** When Columbus landed in Guanahani (renamed San Salvador, Bahama Islands by Columbus), he began the European settlement of the New World. Guanahani was inhabited by the Taíno people and it wasn’t really a new world. In this…