Tuesday, September 22, 2020 at 13:30 UTC (which is the same as 9:30 am EST), will be the Autumnal Equinox. It is the time of year when the imaginary plane that passes through the Earth’s Equator would also travel through the…
Fall Equinox 2020
Tag: 7th
Viral growth – Talk like a Pirate Day
Saturday, September 19th is talk like a pirate day.
Bring some humor and marketing understanding into your class with this activity about a silly holiday that has had viral growth.
Extreme weather 2020
Use the open number line and our lists of temperature extremes to make signed number operations and absolute value sensible. Students compare record high and low temps (integers) and use absolute value in order to always find the positive difference. Subtraction of negatives becomes obvious in this lesson.
How many gumballs are there?
Thinking, estimating, and calculating! How many gumballs are there? How much would it cost to buy them all? How long would it take me to buy them all?
NBA Finals 2020
Exploring NBA championship data. Check out the dominance of a select few teams in NBA history. Students work the data, data representations and statistics. For which kind of observations are circle graphs or bar graphs most useful? Finally, who has won the most NBA titles NBA history?
Labor Day 2020
What is this holiday about? Are we celebrating the start of school? New cars? The end of summer? In this short activity, students learn about the intended meaning of Labor Day as they read about its origin. For the mathematical…
USPS needs help!
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.
What will supplies costs this year for going back to school?
Back to school spending is huge and students might not appreciate what it costs to send them back to, essentially, their job of learning. In this activity students decide what equipment and supplies are necessary, estimate how much that will…
Ramen noodle heist
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?
How big is this hornet really?
Giant hornets have now migrated to North America. In this activity students take the hornet’s measurements in millimeters and try to draw the hornet, life-sized, on centimeter graph paper. They learn a little more about the new beast.
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…
Largest s’more ever!
What is reasonable.? How many marshmallows are in this recipe? How many people could this cookie feed? How many marshmallows could you eat?
What does the data show?
When you look at the new case numbers of the Coronavirus in the U.S. and compare that with various world and national events and our present scientific understandings, what do you wonder? What can you deduce? What might the future…
How much water should you be drinking?
How fast will my new puppy mature?
There is a new dog aging formula that depends on methyl markers that adhere to the DNA molecules of living things. Now we know that dogs don’t age as we thought that they did.