Thanksgiving Math Activities

 

It is that time of year again, the Wednesday right before students are off to enjoy Thanksgiving and a four day weekend.  We know they aren't interested in doing a regular lesson so why not plan an activity that uses math to address some aspect of Thanksgiving.

One site that can be counted on to have Thanksgiving themed math activities is Yummy Math.  If you check the site, they have an activity on cranberries.  In Alaska, the cranberries we grow are quite low and close to the ground since they are classified as low bush cranberries.

The cranberries the activity cover those grown commercially for juice, sauce, jelly, and the fresh ones sold at the grocery store.  The activity looks at why they float, how much each weighs and how many make a pound, etc after watching a video on harvesting cranberries.  Students are expected to estimate, predict, calculate, and use problem solving skills to complete the worksheet. 

In addition, to looking at cranberries, there is an activity on cooking your turkey, making mashed potatoes from so many pounds of potatoes and making pumpkin pie for what people eat.  There are also a couple activities on football.  One activities have students interpret information about NFL teams on an infographic while the other activity has students creating a graph from data on fourth quarter decisions  whether to punt or try a field goal.

There are also several activities designed to look at consumer spending at this time of year and the savings people find during the Black Friday sales.  In addition, this site has two activities relating to Macy's Thanksgiving day parade but they have the cravat that these are older and do not take into account the changes Macy made for this year.  The final couple of activities look at the distance someone ran and building structures out of cans.

On the other hand, Math-aids has some four quadrant coordinate plane pictures available so students can practice plotting coordinate points and end up with Thanksgiving themed pictures. There are two turkey pictures, one pilgrim hat, and a pumpkin with a pilgrim hat.  Once students finish graphing the picture, they can color in the final product. 

Finally, Wallethub has a great Thanksgiving infographic that includes information such as the average cost for a 10 person dinner, or how many total calories consumed by Americans on Thanksgiving day. It lists people favorite dishes, the number of hours a male has to work to work off a meal, the number of total turkeys killed, the number of questions answered by the Butterball hot line and do many other interesting facts.

It makes an awesome what do you notice?, what do you wonder? and what type of mathy questions could be asked about this infographics.  In addition, it would be easy to have students take some of the information and turn it into pie charts, bar graphs, and other graphical representations.  Let me know what you think,  I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.