The Post Office, Christmas, Wrapping Gifts, and Art..

 

It is the time of the year again, when we have to meet deadlines so Christmas gifts will make it to all the relatives in time. The village I live in, finally got the a bunch of mail after almost 10 days of no mail deliveries from Anchorage.  The post office was actually open Saturday due to the huge amount of mail arriving and more came in on Sunday.

According to a release, in 2019, the United States Post office delivered over 28 million packages each day between December 16 to the 21st.  In addition, the number drops to about 20 million packages per day to the end of the year.  Furthermore, it is predicted the post office will deliver over 800 million packages between Thanksgiving and New Years day.  

This year, everything is so much different due to the Coronavirus.  Since so many people are under lockdown and cannot travel, the number of orders made to online shops has increased significantly so the number of packages being shipped is threatening to overwhelm the post office and other shippers. It is estimated that e-commerce sales will reach close to $189 billion for November and December.  This is a 33 percent increase over last year.  The above information can be used by students to figure out how much the e-commerce sales were last year. 

Now for looking at holiday activities one can do in the classroom to celebrate the season.  This site has a wonderful breakdown of the number of toys that must be delivered to children over the 24 hour Christmas Day.  It was done by an Engineer back in 1990 but it would be easy to have students update some of the information to see how things have changed since it was originally written. Once students have updated the information, they can calculate the percent increase or decrease over the years.  The article offers the opportunity to carry out an analysis of the original data.

Christmas time is perfect for an exploration of surface area due to having to wrap presents.  Yummy Math has a great activity that has students comparing wrapping presents using the traditional method where the paper is set to go with the present or wrapping the gift on the diagonal to see which one uses less paper.  The lesson uses both surface area and the Pythagorean theorem during the exploration.

Yummy Math has another activity involves students determining if they have enough paper to wrap a certain present.  The specific wrapping paper chosen is the tissue paper which based on personal experience requires at least two to three sheets to properly cover a present and usually comes in smaller sized sheets than wrapping paper on a roll.  

Yummy Math also has a variation of the wrapping activity where students are shown a picture of a man who is purchasing two large gifts.  Students are asked to estimate how much paper will be needed to wrap these gifts and if one roll of paper is enough. Students are given the length and width of the roll of paper and they have to calculate area, estimate the measurements of the gifts, and are required to make predictions. 

This is also the perfect time of year to have students practice coordinate graphing since there are a lot of free coordinate drawing activities.  At this site, you can get one that allows students to create a picture of Santa Claus.  Math-aids has at least 6 different graphs to celebrate the season with trees or a gift or other ones.  Prefer something cute, check out the well wrapped Penguin for a winter celebration. On Wednesday, I'll be checking out the cost for someone to share the 12 days of Christmas for a love.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.