Check out this beach towel! What do you wonder? What would you like to know?
Tag: estimation
March Madness – 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.
Throwing Up 2023
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.
Earth’s perihelion with the Sun
Today, Wednesday, January 4th, 2023, 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…
How many feet of lights should I buy for my tree?
In this 3-act task, your class guesses how many feet of lights you will need to light your tree. Then gather data from groups and find means or medians. Then actually calculate an estimate given tree dimensions.
Do I have enough wrapping paper?
In this problem based activity students first guess and then try to calculate whether they will have enough paper to wrap this present without taping pieces of wrapping paper together. I have to wrap this box. ⇒ ⇐ …
Lots of Cranberries
In this activity, students learn about how cranberries are grown and harvested; estimate their size and quantities; and see what they can deduce from published statistics.
The size of chocolates
In time for Halloween, students assume that all of our pieces of chocolate are about the same thickness and proceed to approximate their volumes by comparing only their surface areas. Encourage them to create overlapping grids and count the fully and partially-covered cells or use the mean radius method.
Are hurricanes getting stronger and more frequent?
Updated! In this updated hurricane activity, we’ve ask students to examine the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale and consider what other elements besides this ranking may contribute to the devastation that is caused by tropical storms. Students read about hurricane classfications…
How many gumballs are there?
Willy Makeit or Betty Wont
Finally! I see a bathroom sign! Wait … it is in kilometers? How far is that? Should I run?
Will sending you back to school this year cost a fortune?
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.
Just ONE hot dog
A newly released nutritional and environmentally sustainable study shows that eating just one hot dog can take 36 minutes off your total healthy lifespan. How many would you have to eat to lose a whole year of your lifetime? How much did Joey Chestnut loose in the 10 minutes of Nathan’s annual contest?
Lots of pieces
Brian has a lot of puzzles. His family must love working on them. What do you wonder about his puzzles? What do you notice? Make an educated guess, about how many pieces are in all of these puzzles? Can you…
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…