Tag: 8.SP

Before the holidays (16 activities)

We have tons (well, 16) of activities to bring to your class in this last week before the holiday break. Movies, science, art, cooking, economics, weather and the logic of calendars. Enjoy!

Three Hanukkah activities

Three great activities to play and learn about Hanukkah. Soda displays, Hebrew calendar, and relating two recipes for their healthiness.

Should I buy a gasoline, hybrid, or electric car

Should you buy a hybrid or an electric car to save money and the planet? Students create equations for finding the break-even points of these vehicles by mileage and years of ownership.  They then work with systems of equations to…

April 15th happenings

We have 6 April 15th activities. The Boston Marathon, Where your tax money goes, Jackie Robinson, and Paul Revere’s ride.

April Fool’s Day fun

Try one of these 4 activities on April Fools Day. Where did that extra dollar go? Mystical Mathematical Mind Reader; perplexing missing square in the triangle; and Robert Kaplinsky’s foil prank.

Olympic Schedule

The Winter Olympics begins this week in Beijing.

Wikipedia had this schedule of events. We think that there is a lot of information missing and apparent in this graphic. What can you tell and what would you like to know?

Activities for the Holiday break

Students work with the geodesic icosahedron of the Time’s Square Ball by slicing an icosahedron. How are properties valued according to their distance from GO in the game of Monopoly? Games with dice; puzzles; probabilities; and more.

Hanukkah is almost here! – updated

Updated 2022! Hanukkah begins on Sunday, December 18th this year. Why is the date always different? 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…

Veterans Day 2021

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?

Fall Equinox 2021

Updated for 2021! Tuesday, September 22, 2021 at 19:21 UTC (which is the same as 3:21 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…

Monopoly and summer games

In the board game, Monopoly, does a property’s distance from GO correlate to its rent when you land on it? Using Brian’s spread sheet (list of properties, distance from GO, rent and rent with properties), students create scatter plots.  They…

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.

Really big shoe

Brian and his son were doing some shopping when he found this shoe.  Egad!  Could that be someone’s real shoe? In this activity student need to use a shoe size chart, patterns or linear modeling to try to figure out…