There are three money word problems in this activity, each one is set in the same context. The first asks what was the total amount grandma spent, the second how many grandchildren grandma has, and the third asks how much grandma spent...

Two scenarios are presented for chemistry detectives to decipher. Both require the use of an infrared spectrometer and focus on the examination of polymer materials. In the first, lumps in polyethylene bottles are analyzed. In the...

Newspaper in Education (NIE) Week honors the contributions of the newspaper and is celebrated in the resource within a civics, mathematics, and fine arts setting. The resource represents every grade from 3rd to 12th with questions...

Mathematicians need to know that not all numbers are rational. We approximate irrational number with rational numbers. That is why a calculator may be misleading. This task give learners an opportunity to see how rounding a number and...

Investigate the effect of one-axis rotations on geometric figures. Scholars learn to use snap cubes and the right-hand rule to draw figures after rotations about the x-, y-, or z-axes. They try their hands at examples created by the...

Rose's commute to school is a fractional distance. After she runs part of the way, your class needs to determine what fractional distance she ran. This problem explores fraction operations through modeling and computation. The...

Viewers learn about three different weather measurement tools in installment five of the 10-part Discover Your Changing World series. They build weather vanes to collect data on wind speed, barometers to determine air pressure, and...

Your algebra learners work to address the order of operations applied to an expression's input variable and the limitations that may be created because of it. This simple task of a few very well-chosen exercises is elegant in it's way of...

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...

Your class members will have the opportunity to practice the valuable skill of constructing a personal budget using real-world resources, such as a car advertisement and grocery list. They will take into consideration monthly and yearly...

Hooray for chocolate chip cookies! Ask your mathematicians to triple a chocolate chip cookie recipe and then reduce the recipe by one-fourth. Your class may need two days to complete, tripling the recipe the first day and reducing the...

The scientific issue of carbon-14 dating and exponential decay gets a statistics-based treatment in this problem. The class starts with a basic investigation of carbon content, but then branches out to questions of accuracy and...

"Fore!" All right, no one really yells this out in miniature golf, but this well-defined activity will have your charges using lots of numbers in their unique design of a miniature golf hole. Included in the activity criteria is the...

When do you multiply a fraction by a fraction? Here, fifth graders are given 10 different word problems and asked to decide if multiplying 2/5 x 1/8 is appropriate. Many times, real-world word problems sound similar although the required...

The objective of this activity is to find the percent of the area of a two squares overlapping. Mathematicians find the ratio of area for the part that overlaps to the rectangle formed. The final answer is a percent as a rate per 100....

Solve a real-life problem using function-building skills. Presented with an open-ended question, scholars complete a checklist to create and justify a solution in an interesting algebra project. The checklist asks for justifications of...

Weathering is not necessarily a result of the weather. Scholars conduct an experiment to explore the effect of surface area and volume on the weathering process. They create their own sugar cube rocks using the same number of cubes—but...

What would change in your daily life due to a power outage? Here, learners explore the inventions brought to us by the one and only, Thomas Edison, and imagine a day without them. Scholars take part in a grand conversation and write a...

Students use numeric operations and concepts to describe, analyze, communicate, synthesize numeric data, and to solve problems.

This activity highlights the use of the remainder theorem to solve for the unknown coefficient of a specified polynomial when given one of its factors. Use this single problem as a warm-up exercise, a quick check-in at the end of a...

The rides at a theme park always have limits on weight or number of riders. This makes a natural example of the use of inequalities to solve real-world problems. Learners explore intuitive solutions using substitution to solve the...

Practice simplifying complex fractions and long division of polynomials with this brief exercise. These four questions make a challenging warm-up activity or a short, but comprehensive, follow-up after a detailed lesson on algebraic...

Spin the wheel of the fraction contraption and learn about equivalent fractions! After constructing their own spinners, kids use printable pizzas to represent fractions that are equal in value.

This quick set of problems provides a brief refresher on the arithmetic of complex numbers. Learners need to multiply, add and subtract, and remember features of i when raised to a power. Included solutions are clear enough that...