Valentine's Day Math Opportunities

 

Valentine's day is sneaking up on us. Instead of doing this column the day before or the day of, I thought I'd share some resources early enough to plan. It is nice to have a choice of activities to choose from so students have options. 

Many of these range from fairly easy things like graphing a heart to something more that requires a higher level of math but there should be something for every level.

Let's start with a heart shaped pizza activity at Emergent Math. Back in 2011, Papa Johns pizza chain offered two different heart shaped pizzas, one with one topping, and a second one offering two heart shaped pizzas for about $6.00 more.  The author could not find any information on size but he does suggest asking open ended questions such as how would you cut this pizza, or how would you go about finding the area of the pizza, and so many more ideas.  It is one of those activities with no "correct" answer but so many possibilities.

As of last year, Yummy Math had activities for both Valentines and Presidents day since they are both fairly close to each other. One note here, Yummy Math will be retired beginning January of 2024 so you might want to check everything out and download what you want.  For 2022, they have a web page offering 11 different math activities for Valentine's day.  One deals with the return of sweet heart candies.  The original company went bankrupt in 2018 but another company took over so students will look at this, the number of candies sold, etc.  There is an exercise on where flowers come from for this special day, along with so many other possibilities.  Check it out.

If you don't want to spend all class doing a full math lesson, what about incorporating math into art?  This site has a clever twist on the Sierpinski Triangle activity that uses hearts instead of triangles.  It also looks at different ways of making cartoids, and a mobius strip for Valentines day.

If you didn't know, Science Friday did a wonderful lesson on hearts.  The lesson covers from how to draw one using a square and one circle to translation of the hearts, dilation, reflection, and rotation.  In addition, each section has a challenge and at the bottom, it explores combining some of these such as rotation and dilation.  In addition, someone created a lesson at Geogebra based on this so it is already to go if you want to do it.

So have fun choosing which one of these activities you want to do in your class.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.