Jada has a rectangle board that is measured in inches. Young learners confirm their understanding of converting inches to feet. Then they find the area in square feet. Jada thinks she has a short-cut to convert inches square to square...

Groups use a marble to determine the viscosity of household fluids. The procedure calls for pupils to measure the amount of time it takes a marble to fall a specified distance in the fluids. Using unit conversions and algebra, the teams...

A multi-step problem has learners finding the actual area based on a scale drawing and then converting units at the end. Two different solution choices are listed depending on the preference on which step to start first. Both methods can...

Teams learn about the size of a nanometer by measuring objects and converting those measurements. A worksheet then tests the groups' abilities to use nanometers by having them determine the size of objects that are too small to...

Your class is to find the percent of the lot that is not covered by a house. Make sure your pupils understand the problems before they begin. The lot is the whole of the percent problem and the house is the part. The exercise is good...

Learners are given a volume of a rectangular tank and are asked to find the water height. Because the total volume of the tank is given in liters, your geometers will need to use a unit ratio to convert to centimeters cubed. The exercise...

With minimal setup and maximum freedom, young geometers are encouraged to think outside the box on a seemingly simple application problem. Though the task seems simple, measuring a given paper clip and finding how many 10 meters can...

A question to ask your class is, How fast is your Internet? That depends on the data transfer rate (DTR), which is the unit rate used in this activity. Math young scholars will calculate how long it takes to download a music file and a...

Even though pennies seem to be relatively thin, stack enough of them into a single stack, and you could have quite a high stack. Enough so, that the final result can be a surprise to you as well as your class. This activity centers...

Examine the relationship between time and geometry. A series of five lessons provides a grade-appropriate problem from elementary through high school. Each problem asks learners to compare the movement of the hands on a clock to an angle...

Have you ever wondered how many ants make up an elephant? Inquisitive minds will be amazed as they use scientific notation to compute and compare the mass of an elephant to an ant. Have participants make guesses and see how close they...

Teams must determine the size of cavern needed to house the citizens of Alabraska to protect them from the asteroid impact. Using scaling properties, teams first determining the number of people that could sleep in a classroom and then...

The incredibly shrinking meter—decimeters to centimeters, to millimeters, and now to nanometers! Learners may have a difficult time visualizing particles on a nanoscale. Help them see a little clearer using a well-designed lesson...

There is more than one way to answer a question; especially when you have fractions in measurement. Here are three questions with real-world situations in which 5th graders are asked to provide answers in three ways: a larger unit of...

The humble soda can gets the geometric treatment in an activity that links math and science calculations. After a few basic assumptions are made and discussed, surface area calculations combine with density information to develop an...

Create an egg-citing study of energy. Pupils investigate the effect of height and mass on the overall amount of energy of a falling object. The fourth segment in a six-part series on energy uses a weighted egg falling from different...

Looking for a real-world situation to practice converting units? In this problem, learners must change miles per gallon to liters per km (or vice versa) to determine which car gets better gas miileage. It is a relatively short problem,...

Elapsed time is a skill developed by the single question that is the center of this activity. Fifth graders are asked to find out the time that is 2011 minutes after the beginning of 2011. This question addresses the standard that...

Candlelight is in the eye of the distant beholder. Scholars first watch a video clip of a commercial claiming that the human eye can see candlelight from 10 miles away. They use this information to calculate how far we can see...

Compare sizes of microscopic items. Given a set of labels of microscopic objects, pupils try to place them in order from smallest to largest. Scholars then compare their lists to the actual comparisons along with the measurements of the...

Don't let the learning in your classroom get jammed up! Intrigue your scholars with an open-ended scenario to explore. A video presentation shows a challenging stretch of road that is susceptible to traffic jams. The task is to determine...

How efficient is a motor in a LEGO set? Future engineers conduct an activity where a LEGO motor-generator system raises an object to a specified height. They then show what they learned and use their measurements to calculate the energy...

The class gets to practice being a mathematician in ancient Greece, performing geometric application problems in the way of Eratosthenes. After following the steps of the great mathematicians, they then compare the (surprisingly...

Chart your way to an understanding of nanoscale. Using a Google map, learners estimate a radius around their location of 1,000 and 1,000,000 meters. Predicting what 1,000,000,000 meters would look like takes them off the charts!...