Sts learn a little history, question what they have learned earlier, and calculate how far off Columbus was from East India and his understanding of the actual circumference of the Earth.
Indigenous Peoples or Columbus Day
Tag: 7.G
The James Webb space telescope and the Hubble
There have been outstanding images coming to NASA from the James Webb Telescope. Take some time to compare the Webb to the Hubble telescope that has been sending images to Earth since 1990. Look at what is different and what…
Shooting for Three
The NBA court has a 3-point line that separates how many points a player will earn for his team by making a basket from outside of that line. Teams have been shooting more and more three’s, but should they be and why?
Daylight Savings Time and Pi Day are coming up!
How does the start of Daylight Savings Time make you feel? – updated! Will you wake up and go to sleep earlier or later on Sunday? What kind of chart or picture could you draw to help you compare before…
Lighting the 2022 Olympic Torch
This activity introduces students to the power of a parabolic mirror in focusing the Sun’s rays to a single, hot, point … the focus of the parabola.
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.
Will one roll be enough?
Students can use the man or the basket as a reference as they try to approximate the size of these gifts and how much wrapping paper will actually be needed. Approximation, surface area, reasoning explanation, and diagraming! An X-box is…
What can you tell about a snowflake?
As a snowflake falls from the sky, its crystal grows according to the humidity and temperatures of the air that it passes through. In this activity, students interpret a graphic that clarifies that growth and try to deduce what conditions…
Wrapping presents on the diagonal
In this activity students determine if this method for minimizing wrapping paper is actually more efficient then the traditional method. For a hands on learning experiment, have students actually wrap a small rectangular prism using any available paper in both the traditional and diagonal methods. Then let them compare the two quantities of wrapping paper and decide which method uses less paper and by what percent.
Collecting the most candy
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…
3/14 – Pi Day is almost here
We have 9 activities to help you celebrate π in your school and in your math class with activities that demonstrate how π was derived; visually show why π makes sense; show a surprising place where π is used; increase students ability to measure and long divide; applauds the talent of people who can memorize large strings of numbers; and lets students just have fun.
How much snow is that?
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…
Winter solstice
Updated for 2021! 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-solstice2021.pdf
December 21, 2020 – Great conjunction
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…
Canstruction
Just before Thanksgiving there are competitions all over the world to celebrate cool design, tricky engineering, and to donate a whole lot of food. How many cans does it take to build this structure? What information do you need to determine this? How did you determine your solution? What else did you notice that is mathematical?