California Academy of Science
Building Better Buses: Transportation Design Challenges
Scholars learn about a series of three challenges when they design a bus system for a small town. They determine the bus routes and then figure out the best type of fuel to use before considering the cost of going electric. Learners...
Curated OER
Arkansas' Top Ten Events of the Century....Says Who? Why? Deciding What is Important in History
Middle and high schoolers work in small groups to compare four different lists published in the Arkansas Times newspaper which chose the "top ten" Arkansas news events of the 20th century. Learners look for similarities and differences...
EngageNY
The Power of Exponential Growth
How do you make a penny grow to $5,000 in just 15 days? Use the examples in this lesson to explore the concept of exponential growth and its comparison to linear models. Pupils come to understand that exponential growth eventually...
Curated OER
Fractions - Equal or Not
A fabulous lesson on fractions awaits your young mathematicians. In it, learners are invited to explore the world of fractions by accessing websites that have educational activities and worksheets embedded in them. Some excellent,...
Curated OER
Basic Excel
Students explore basic Excel spreadsheets. For this spreadsheet lesson plan, students enter Alaska weather information and perform calculations. Students title the columns on the spreadsheet and format the cells. ...
Curated OER
The Ants Go Marching
Integrate art, math, life science, music, and fun in this beginning addition and subtraction activity. Children kinesthetically represent adding and subtracting numbers to 10; they stand up one at a time as you count forward and sit down...
Curated OER
Energy Audit
Students collect data about energy usage and use mathematical calculations to analyze their data. In this energy conservation and statistics math lesson, students survey their homes to complete an energy usage worksheet. Students...
Curated OER
Exploring Polygons and The Greedy Triangle
Excellent instructional activity! Anne Linehane's geometry story, The Greedy Triangle, offers an opportunity to practice forming various types of polygons with your learners. Using elastic bands (or Chinese jump...
Mathematics Assessment Project
Mean, Median, Mode, and Range
What a find! Here is a lesson, designed to meet sixth grade math Common Core standards, that focuses on the calculation of different measures of center for the scores from a penalty shoot-out competition. An independent...
NTTI
Putting Together Ten
Groups explore sets of 10 items in two varieties (i.e. 3 white buttons and 7 black ones, or 5 bears and 5 bunnies). They brainstorm about their objects, write math sentences to represent what they have, and report their discoveries...
Curated OER
Correlation of Variables by Graphing
Middle and high schoolers use a spreadsheet to graph data. In this graphing lesson, learners determine how two parameters are correlated. They create a scatter plot graph using a computer spreadsheet.
Delaware Math Cadre Elementary Committee
Operations and Algebraic Thinking
How to use the relationship between multiplication and division to solve math word problems is the focus of the instructional activity presented here. In it, fourth graders work in groups to solve problems posed by the teacher. Then,...
NOAA
Methane Hydrates – What's the Big Deal?
Have you ever tried to light ice on fire? With methane hydrate, you can do exactly that. The ice forms with methane inside so it looks like ice, but is able to burn. The lesson plan uses group research and a hands-on activity to help...
Curated OER
Come Into my Parlor
An interesting cross-curricular lesson plan on dairy farming awaits your students. Elements of language arts, math, social studies, and agriculture are all present. Many excellent worksheets and a good article on dairy farming are...
Curated OER
Marshmallow Geometry
In this three-dimensional shapes geometry lesson, learners identify geometric solids and name their properties. They define "face," "edge," and "vertex," and construct geometric solids using marshmallows as vertices and toothpicks as edges.
Curated OER
Go Fish!
Students share a bowl of goldfish crackers. In this lesson on sharing, students see how a limited resource goes furthest when it is evenly shared. Students are allowed to take as many crackers as they would like, and then in contrast,...
Curated OER
How Old Is Illinois?
High schoolers use fossils found in rocks to determine the age of the strata between Rock Island and Chicago. Pupils pretend they are geologists. They must determine the age of all rock layers between the Mississippi River and Lake...
Federal Reserve Bank
Credit Reports—and You Thought Your Report Card Was Important
Get the facts about credit and take a close look at what factors into a consumer credit report with this fantastic lesson plan. Your pupils will read informational texts, read sample financial documents, and discuss the...
Mary Pope Osborne, Classroom Adventures Program
Mummies in the Morning Egyptian pyramids, hieroglyphics
Visit the Magic Treehouse and take your class on a trip through time with a reading of the children's book Mummies in the Morning. Using the story to spark an investigation into Egyptian culture, this literature unit engages...
Curated OER
Telling Time: Elapsed Time
Students review time telling skills and are introduced how to determine the time before or after an interval of hours. They then determine the time at the end of an interval of hours and minutes and solve problems about elapsed time.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Color Variation over Time in Rock Pocket Mouse Populations
A species-specific look at natural selection, the resource herein examines how adaptations have helped the population of rock pocket mice survive in a changing landscape. To begin, middle or high schoolers watch a 10.5 minute video,...
EngageNY
Bean Counting
Why do I have to do bean counting if I'm not going to become an accountant? The 24th installment of a 35-part module has the class conducting experiments using beans to collect data. Learners use exponential functions to model this...
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Simple and Compound Interest
Your learners will get lots of practice calculating simple and compound interest by the end of this lesson. Simple explanations and examples lead learners through the concepts and steps of calculating simple and compound interest...
EngageNY
Between-Figure and Within-Figure Ratios
Tie the unit together and see concepts click in your young mathematicians' minds. Scholars apply the properties of similar triangles to find heights of objects. They concentrate on the proportions built with known measures and solve to...