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...

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...

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 lesson of 15, participants convert numbers in scientific...

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...

"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.

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...

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...

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...

Looking for a fresh take on traditional food/energy pyramids? Conduct an innovative activity where pupils build their own! The lesson uses research data from Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique for a real-life safari touch. Scholars...

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.

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

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...

Discover relationships between linear and nonlinear functions. Initially, a set of data seems linear, but upon further exploration, pupils realize the data can model an infinite number of functions. Scholars use multiple representations...

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 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...

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...

Have you ever conducted a Web search and received too many hits? Teach your class about Boolean search terms and provide them time to practice conducting efficient online searches. This lesson plan contains several fun activities which...

Students study the growth of the Phoenix area using geographic images, maps, tables, and graphs. They study the idea of community.

Round and round they go ... where they stop, only scholars will know. By writing systems of equations, classes determine the number of cars a roundabout can handle given specific constraints. Systems use up to six variables and become...

Learners examine musical instruments as main part of the study of sound energy. In this designing instruments lesson plan, students focus on the elements of an instrument that cause sound to be created and design a unique musical...

Sixth graders study the concept of probability. In this probability instructional activity, 6th graders create spinners that match specific sets of clues. Students use their spinners and worksheets to explore and predict probability.