Everyone loves a good deal, and your mathematician's job is to calculate the original price when given the discount. A different type of problem than the traditional "find the percent change" has your learners working backwards to...

It is up to the learner to find the amount of juice originally in a bottle, knowing what fraction of the juice is left, and the amount that has been consumed. The accompanying commentary provides a useful and detailed description of...

You are used to teaching repeating decimals with bar notation that keeps us from writing that number over and over again; now teach what the over and over again represents. This activity allows your mathematicians to explore the infinite...

Comparing the movement of graphs geometrically when small changes are made to the parent function motivates this collaborative discussion on the transformations of functions to their various forms. Vertical and horizontal shifts due to...

Take an alternative route with trigonometry and let learners connect a tweaked version of the pythagorean theorem to the original in terms of triangle sides. The assignment leads participants towards deriving the Pythagorean identity...

Function notation is like a code waiting to be cracked. Learners take the graph of an unknown equation and manipulate it based on three different transformation changes of the function equation. The final step is to look at three points...

Everyone loves a sale! As pupils investigate a sale on t-shirts, they determine the percent discount and original prices.

Increase the percent of pupils that are fluent in solving change problems with an activity that asks class members to look at problems that involve either increases or decreases and to express the change in terms of the percent of...

 A short assessment asks participants to find the original radius required to replace a table top. The problem provides a hypothetical situation of having a segment of a broken glass table top. Pupils find the radius of the...

Dilations from the origin have a multiplicative effect on the coordinates of a point. Pupils use the method of finding the image of a point on a ray after a dilation to find a short cut. Classmates determine the short cut of being...

Fill in the blanks to find the best discount! Groups complete a table of amounts and percents associated with sale items. Classmates then find the original cost, sale cost, discount amount, paid percent, or the discount percent...

Scale up your lessons with a performance task. Young data analysts work through an assessment task on scaled bar graphs. They answer questions about a given scaled bar graph on favorite colors, analyze a bar graph to see if it matches...

Construct tangent lines and make the connection to tangent functions. An informative lesson reviews the geometry origins of the tangent function. Pupils use that information to determine how to construct a tangent to a circle from a...

When a random sample isn't enough, your math class can compare the data from a physical simulation to decide if the probability is still likely. The lesson is part of a probability series that focuses on one question and different ways...

Learning how numbers are put together as parts and wholes is a big step in building the foundational number sense of young mathematicians. Here, children are given a number less than 10 and are asked to find as many pairs of numbers as...

From Marbury v. Madison and original jurisdiction to Gideon v. Wainwright and civil appeal, here is a simple and comprehensive assessment on the judicial system of the United States.

Picture your pupils using this assessment task. Class members must first determine the measurements of smaller copies of photographs placed next to the original. They then determine the dimensions of the entire sheet of photographs.

Quilting is not only beautiful and unique—it is a mathematical art. Show your classes how to design a quilting block while practicing area and circumference of circles. Scholars create a star from a square and then find the circumference...

It's all about lines when going around. Pupils graph the relationship between the length of a side of a square and its perimeter. Class members explain the origin in context of the side length and perimeter. They compare the graph to the...

Combine simplifying trigonometric expressions with evaluating them! An open-ended question presents a trigonometric expression and numeric values for additional expressions. Learners must determine a value for the original expression by...

There's no way around it—learners must use trigonometry to model the line of sight around a race track! Using the starting line as the origin, pupils model the straight line distance to any car using a trigonometric expression. The...

Is the sequel better than the original? The 2011 AP® Statistics free-response questions, Form B, is available for instructors to reference. Among the topics covered in the exam are histograms, distributions, studies and experiments,...

Is there a secret to keeping secrets? Scholars choose a character in a novel or play and analyze how the character keeps a secret.  Writers also craft essays to reveal elements of poetry and the use of language in a passage. The...

A two-part assessment challenges scholars to gather information from reading then write an opinion piece. In part one, learners read, take notes, and answer text-related questions. In part two, participants use their new-found knowledge...