It’s hard to shovel new snow when you have to get your shovel-full over previous snow banks. You have to throw the snow practically straight up. Predict the arc of your shovel throw with a parabola and refine your formula by manipulating the parabolic factors.
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!
Here comes Black Friday, Small business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday. It’s a crazy time of year. Use all of that shopping to educate your students about good deals and how shoppers can be fooled. Is this really 70%…
In this activity students decide what equipment and supplies are necessary, estimate how much that will all cost, confer with classmates to refine their lists, and then research to find out more accurately how much it will probably cost to send them back to school. This activity could be used for students in upper elementary school all the way to high school. It offers an opportunity for kids to estimate, research, reason, calculate and communicate with each other.
Probably most of us have heard of and even used hexadecimal color codes. Don’t you wonder why their number descriptions really make sense? In this activity we first ask students to color in our Golden Spiral by giving them the…
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…
How much pee is in this pool? – A Canadian chemist, Xing-Fang Li, has found a marker for urine that chlorine doesn’t disguise. In this activity, students calculate volume of several pools, change that cubic foot volume to gallons of pool water,…
We have 6 April 15th activities. The Boston Marathon, Where your tax money goes, Jackie Robinson, and Paul Revere’s ride.
Civilian Ukrainians are fleeing the war zone in order to remain safe and find food and housing. How do these numbers compare with other tragic evacuations. While interpreting graphics and working with these huge numbers, bring your student’s opinions and concerns into your math class.
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…
Inflation in the cost of living, last year (2021) was estimated to be about a 7%. If “shrinkflation” is happening at the same time as general inflation, is the unit cost for those shrunk items actually raised even more than 7%? Let’s find out.
Let your students practice manipulating exponents. Multiplication, division, roots, powers of powers. This powerful activity asks them to do some impressive mathematics … in their heads.
This is one of the fastest Olympic sports. Lugers, on tiny sleds, zoom down a solid ice track at fantastic speeds, hold their bodies in an aerodynamically optimized position while fighting extreme G-force, and use only a helmet as their…
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?
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…