Spring is the start of tick encounters. Help students study the prevalence of Lyme disease in the US; in their own state; and methods for preventing it. What are your odds of contracting Lyme disease?
It’s tick time again … and Lyme disease
Tag: 7.RP
Shoprite’s solar energy goals on the African continent
Shoprite is the largest supermarket chain in Africa. The company is presently engaged in increasing their use of solar power to harness the abundant natural resource of solar potential on the African continent. Besides saving the Earth, how big is…
Which car, hybrid or electric, should I buy?
Students create equations for finding the break-even points of hybrid and electric vehicles by mileage and years of ownership. They work with systems of equations to find the number of years or number of miles where the cost of these cars are the same.
Does seeding really matter?
Engage your students in percents as they get excited about March Madness. Is getting a higher seed really an advantage? Use 30 years of data to help determine for which seeds it makes sense to pick an upset. Finally, students determine a general strategy for picking games in the first round.
The Iditarod race will be different this year
We have two Iditarod activities for you and your classes to choose from. Appreciate the “Greatest Race on Earth”!
At least the days are getting longer
What’s your guess? How fast are the number of daylight hours changing each day? Are the changes dramatic or subtle? Students make guesses; compute how long, on average, the change in daylight hours should be; and finally understand the variability in our year of daylight hours.
How should I spend my rewards?
For every dollar that you spend, you accumulate points. You can cash them in for savings on groceries, apply them to your gasoline purchases, or even use them to give to a food kitchen. If you are going to use them for gasoline or groceries, which way gets you the best deal?
Martin Luther King, Jr and social justice
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.
Earth’s perihelion
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…
Veterans Day 2020
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?
Is the Electoral College fair?
After showing the video consider asking your students what the grouping of students must have been for “colored pencils” to win the class electoral college? Is there more than one possibility? What is the minimum number of students that could have voted for colored pencils for them to still win the Electoral College. Students then consider scenarios where a candidate wins the popular vote, but loses the Electoral College.
Costume spending 2020
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.
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?
Chuck E. Cheese needs to shred
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?
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…