Math For Presidents Day.

 

Today is Presidents day.  The day we remember those who were past presidents.  It's actually came about from combining Washington and Lincoln's birthday celebrations into one federal holiday.  While researching Valentines day math, I came across a very interesting math activity on Yummy Math.

Did you know that between 1789 and 2001, the presidential position only received raises five times?  I certainly didn't but this activity at Yummy Math looks at that.  The owners there created an interesting activity to go with the data.  Students are asked to graph the data and they are introduced to step graphs via this data. In addition, they are introduced to the consumer price index and how it is used.  They use the formula given to calculate what that salary is in today's dollars.  In addition, students are given questions to make conclusions based on the data.  This is an interesting topic.

On the other hand, this information leads to a wonderful activity about money.  " A dollar bill is .0043 inches thick, weighs .03 ounces and 6.14 inches long." With this one sentence, students have enough information to calculate how high a stack of one million dollar bills is in inches, feet, yards, and miles.  Students can also calculate how many ounces and pounds one million dollars weighs.  Finally, you can ask students how many inches, feet, yards, and miles one million dollar bills form when laid end to end.  This gives a nice perspective of what the height, weight, and distance of a million dollars since most of us will never see it.

If you have students who struggle with graphing, this site has two graphing activities which have students creating pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Both graphs are done in the first quadrant so there are no negative numbers which is why it is also a great activity for beginning or struggling students. In addition, there is a multiplication and a division worksheet available for younger students who need practice three digit times one digit numbers.

This report about an activity has students analyze data on what states the presidents come from. Students make a prediction about which state had the most men who became president, creates a tally sheet, and then they make a bar graph.  Unfortunately, the original webpage is no longer active so if you want the students to do this, you'll have to provide the info or have them research it. It is a nice activity for students to interpret data and turn it into visual representations.

Most of the "activities" I found that sounded really interesting have been removed and are no longer available.  The others tend to be worksheets that are just worksheets with a president's day banner on it.  These are the ones that were a bit different.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.