In this multi-faceted introduction to pi, participants perform a bevy of pi-related activities. Ranging from measuring household items to singing pi songs and reading pi stories, this fun and non-intimidating resource serves to bring up...

Keep your pets slim, trim, and healthy using mathematics! Pupils use a linear programming model to optimize the amount and type of food to provide to a pet rabbit. They model constraints by graphing inequalities and use them to analyze a...

Explore using units with scientific notation to communicate numbers effectively. Individuals choose appropriate units to express numbers in a real-life situation. In this 13th instructional activity of 15, participants convert numbers in...

If cubism were a religion, would you follow it? Lower-level tasks focus primarily on counting the number cubes in a structure and relating the number to surface area. As learners progress to higher-level tasks, isometric drawings and...

Scholars investigate an issue associated with food systems and design their own solutions. Working collaboratively, they follow each step in the design process to complete the 10th instructional activity of the 13-part Our Hungry Planet...

Can you disprove the law of conservation of mass? Pupils observe the teacher weigh each part of a reaction. Then, the teacher weighs the result of the reaction and everyone sees that the products do not equal the reactants. Then they...

Fourth in a set of several little lessons on density, this one compares the density of fresh and salt water. First by demonstration, and then by a hands-on activity, learners find that adding salt increases the density, as is evidenced...

Here's a resource teachers won't want to wash their hands of. Given a task where a full bar of soap is on one side of a balance and 3/4 of a bar of soup and a 3/4-ounce weight is on the other side, young mathematicians must determine the...

Stars seem to be a far away mystery... but it turns out we know much more about stars than one would think! An engaging lesson shows learners how to read a light spectrum to determine the temperature and chemical makeup of a star....

What can maps tell us about the past? Find out with a Spanish lesson that incorporates geography. After examining maps individually, comparing two old maps of Spanish Florida and writing notes in the provided Venn diagram, pupils pair up...

Here's a new meaning to the expression throwing away money...a carpet of coins! An intriguing lesson requires calculations to determine the coin that would be the cheapest option, but it's a little tricky. The cost of the coin...

"Help Wanted: A Supreme Court Justice." What should be included in the ad? Learners ponder the question during a lively activity that asks them to examine the qualifications for various federal offices and then create job postings....

Patterns in math emerge from seemingly random places. Learners explore the patterns for factoring the sum and differences of perfect roots. Analyzing these patterns helps young mathematicians develop the polynomial identities.

Show learners the power of mathematics as they model real-life designs. Pupils graph a periodic function by comparing the degree of rotation to the height of a ferris wheel. 

What makes a poem difficult? Explore that topic and more with your class as you work through the lesson detailed here. Using materials from Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest, individuals or small groups examine poems and...

Students are introduced to the genre of detective fiction. Based on their reading level, they are given a different series of books to read. For each story, they are to make predictions and practice decoding messages. To end the...

Everyone has a different opinion about the characters they read about in books. Have your class explore forming an opinion and finding evidence to support it as they read and discuss what they think about a particular character. They...

Students have the opportunity to use higher-level thinking skills and to apply their talents to previously learned material. It provides an opportunity for visual, auditory, and tactile/kinetic learners to utilize their particular...

Two sequential parts to this lesson introduce your class to the electromagnetic spectrum, the ability to absorb radiant energy, and the pigments in leaves that are responsible for collecting sunlight to be used in the photosynthetic...

When it comes to rating educational calculators, this calculator is always near the top of this list. Now it's available as an app. There is a lot of calculator power wrapped up in this app. Not only is this a fully functioning...

Can you add variables if you don't know their value? Using an empty number line, scholars first locate the position of the difference, sum, product, and quotient of two unknown integers. Later problems mix operations as well as add...

Tell the story of the math. Given a graph of a linear system, learners write a story that models the graph before crafting the corresponding functions. Graphs intersect at an estimated point, allowing for different variations in the...

Explore a basic pattern to practice writing expressions. In collaborative groups, learners examine a contextual pattern and write an expression to model it. The task encourages groups to describe the pattern in multiple ways.

Explore the measures of central tendency through a challenging task. Given values for the mean, median, mode, and range, collaborative groups create a set of data that would produce those values. They then critique other answers and...