How many stars are in this image and how did you count them?
Tag: patterns
Memorial Day 2022
Who are we honoring? How did the holiday come about? Isn’t Memorial Day usually on May 30th?
Students learn a little about the history of the holiday, analyze the possibilities and patterns for when it is celebrated and make observations about the incredible numbers of deaths that have been caused by war.
Lunar New Year 2022 – Year of the Tiger
A combination of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches, the year’s symbol creates a sequence of year names that eventually repeat. Students explore the least common multiple of these two cycles without ever hearing the term LCM.
What’s interesting about this number?
What is interesting about the number, 12 22 21 … and why did we put it on YummyMath today?
Wind chill
Students use the National Weather System chart to gauge wind chill, examine the patterns that correlate increasing wind and/or decreasing temperatures, use wind chill numbers to estimate possible wind and temperature factors, and generally become familiar with this sort of interpolation and calculation. There’s a great high school extention that uses fractional exponents and logs to solve.
Hanukkah is almost here!
Egad, Hanukkah begins this year on Sunday evening, November 28th. I think it was in December last year. Why isn’t it always on the same date? Students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible mathematics involved in creating a…
Labor Day 2021
What is this holiday about? Are we celebrating the start of school? New cars? The end of summer? Students look for patterns in the history of Labor Day dates. They then use those observed patterns to predict future dates of the holiday.
Beautiful mathematics
Tree for Springtime
Here in the Northeast, flowers are blooming and trees are leafing out. We thought the creation of a tree that grows before your eyes might be akin to what is going on all around us. What do you see that…
Will our U.S. flag change yet again?
How many stripes are in our present flag pictured above? (The bottom right flag that has been in use since 1960.) How many stars? What do the numbers of stars and stripes represent? U.S. Congress is again considering whether to…
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.
Inauguration Date
The date of the Presidential Inauguration this year can be written in an interesting way. What do you notice? What do you wonder? Do you think that this happens often in a year?
Hurricanes 2019
The official Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1 and doesn’t end until November 30th. Now Hurricane Dorian is approaching the East Coast. Encourage your students to join the conversation, knowledgeably, by using our activity. Students read about hurricane classfications and calculate…
Opening Weekend – Avengers: Endgame
Can you tell from its opening weekend how much the new movie, Avengers: Endgame, might earn in theaters? This activity can be used anytime and is especially timely when there is a new blockbuster movie released. We’ve left blank spaces…
Consumer spending 2018
Consumers in the U.S. spend a lot of money. In this activity we look at historical data to see if there are any patterns in our spending. How does our holiday spending show up in these graphs? What accounts for…