Playlist: Bookmarks
An Olympic Sized Pool and Lots of Pasta (Episode 2)
How many pounds of pasta could you cook using the water in an olympic-sized pool?
What’s the Pattern? Fraction Addition
Can your students figure out how to add fractions by looking for a pattern?
Game: Number Scrabble
What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!
What If There Were No Hundreds Place?
Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?
SCAMPER: Scaffolding Creativity
Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.
Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project
Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!
Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?
What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.
Parentheses: How big of a change can they make!?
Two tiny parentheses. One expression. How big of a change can they make? Bigger than you think.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
How Many Ways: Fraction Equivalence
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
Undoing Multiplication With Division
Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!
Building Creative Analogies
We’ll take two seemingly unrelated pieces of content (say volcanoes and the human body) and then build analogies to connect the two ideas. In the end, students can create a skit, comic, or story relating the two concepts.
Finding The Volume of Laptops
How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!
A Donut Investigation
In this cross-curricular investigation, students will look into an intriguing question: do donuts or salads have more sugar? They’ll grapple with misleading information, bias, and use their math skills to create a visual representation of sugar in popular foods.
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
Visualizing Fraction Multiplication
What does it look like to multiply fractions?
Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number
You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
A Grid-Based Fraction Project
You’ve got 60 spaces on a grid to create an amusement park, a house, a farm, or whatever you’d like. Divide it into seven pieces, order it by size, combine into two halves, and more in this fraction project.