Mathematics teachers can tap into students' curiosity about hurricanes to develop their understanding of mathematical ideas within a real-life context. This article discusses hurricane-based mathematics tasks involving cooperative learning that were found to help students enhance their understanding of patterns, graphs, and rates of change. For…

This book is designed to be a quick and easy resource for anyone teaching physics for the first time. Written after extensive research, this book is filled with reliable labs, demos and activities that work well in the classroom. Also included are lesson plans, diagrams, and teacher notes for every activity. The book is not the end--it is just a…

Presents activities in which students are invited to re-create on their calculator screen images using graphical features of the graphing calculator. (ASK)

Presents a collection of fall and Halloween activities for elementary students, including pumpkin poetry, batty bulletin boards (graphing), vegetable variety art, old time radio mysteries, paper doll Halloween safety, career dress-up day, imaginative Halloween writing, and matching animals with foods they eat. A student page offers a Dracula…

Described is an instructional strategy that has incorporated a form of cooperative learning. The three parts of this method are presented as a multimodal discussion cycle. The use of this method with students having special learning needs in mathematics has been found to be particularly effective. (KR)

A unit of study that introduces collecting, representing, describing, and interpreting data is presented. Suitable for students in grades 4 through 6, it provides a foundation for further work in statistics and data analysis. The investigations may extend from one to four class sessions and are grouped into three parts: "Introduction to Data…

Presents an activity through which students develop mathematical concepts connected to area and perimeter in a rich, real-life setting and use tables, graphs, diagrams, and spreadsheets to explore the problem, see relationships, and make and test conjectures about those relationships. Encourages algebraic thinking. (SYB)

A unit of study that introduces sorting and classification as a way of organizing data is presented. Suitable for students in grades 2 and 3, it provides a foundation for further work in statistics and data analysis. The investigations may extend from one to five class sessions and are grouped into three parts: "Introduction to Sorting"; "Sorting…

An activity in which students establish criteria outlining what constitutes wasted paper, calculate averages, and compute the number of trees needed to produce a measured amount of wasted paper is described. The mathematics and science concepts, objectives, rationale, content overview, lesson outline, and extensions are included. (KR)

A unit of study that introduces measuring as a way of collecting data is presented. Suitable for students in grades 3 and 4, it provides a foundation for further work in statistics and data analysis. The investigations may extend from one to four class sessions and are grouped into three parts: "Introduction to Measurement"; "Using Standard…

Presents a unit developed by the 1991 Oregon Mathematics Teachers of Middle School project in which students investigate the average temperature, precipitation, and snowfall in their town using spreadsheets and graphing packages. Students compare the averages over a period of 30 years to a particular year. (MDH)

This guide provides activities based on 13 Mathnet cases that are part of the television program Square One TV. Mathnet is a detective serial which ends each program. Each Mathnet activity consists of a case summary, two short activities, and one longer step-by-step activity, with a reproducible student activity page. Topics include geometry,…

Describes four activities for grade levels K-3, 4-5, and 6-8 and for the family that explore statistical concepts using a manipulative familiar to students-SKITTLES candies. Concepts explored include frequency graphs, data collection and analysis, probability, measures of central tendency, averaging, and correlation coefficients. Includes…

This cross curriculum guide links mathematics, language arts, and social studies. The guide is divided into two sections. The first section provides a series of language arts activities and the second social studies activities. Within these two curriculum areas, the activities provided are based on three Square One TV formats: (1) Mathnet, the…