Real Thanksgiving Based Math

 

As a middle school/ high school math teacher, I hate looking for Thanksgiving themed math activities only to find they are regular worksheets with turkey or pumpkin pie disguised problems.  You know those ones that start "John has 3 pumpkin pies and his sis Mary has 4.......".  I want ones that deal with planning how large a turkey to buy, how long to cook it, how many cans of pumpkin do you need for 3 pies.  Problems that are much more practical in real life.  I'd love problems dealing with Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, the bowl games.  Real things!

Let's start with the Thanksgiving meal.  This site has a really wonderful activity that does not rely on numbers that are unrealistic.  This activity begins by having students create the menu for Thanksgiving dinner.  This is great because what is eaten varies from place to place, person to person.  My sister always had roasted goose while my brothers go for turkey and I don't eat meat so I won't have one.  In addition, it also has students make a shopping list so they know exactly what they need to buy for it.  There is a page for calculating total cost of supplies and another for determining the cost of preparing the meal using electricity or natural gas.  It even looks into the cost of appliances used to store foods in. At the end, the Natural Energy Education Development Project or NEED even provides their numbers for students to analyze. This is a multi day plan and can't be completed in just an hour.  It takes all week.

On the other hand, the EconEdLink people have a lovely activity for looking at the inflation and cost of a Thanksgiving Dinner.  This has just been updated for the current year.  The activity has students looking at real data to learn about price index, changes in the price index, and takes them through the process of seeing how it is done while referring to real references.  Although this is an economics lesson, it does use math and provides students with some real life math usage.

Want to give students an idea of how much it costs to put on Macy's Thanksgiving day parade?  Look at this article from Yahoo Finance because it is eye opening. Image spending between $30,000 to $100,000 for a float, or sponsoring a  brand new balloon for $190,000? This article isn't an actual activity but it gives the costs so you could have students do some problems based on these numbers.  Although the article is from 2018, the costs should be at least the same or even higher. 

On the other hand, The Street has a bit more detailed information on the actual parade route, certain bits of information including how much gas is used to fill a balloon and the actual cost to fill the balloon which is more than the sponsor pays.  There is also a bit of history included but it is quite interesting.  This article is from this year.

Do you know I couldn't find any activities on football games played on Thanksgiving. I found a history of football games but no activity.  I found a list of three games due to be played but no activities. So I went to Yummy Math who has a full page of activities dealing with Thanksgiving.  These range from how much it costs to do a meal, to consumer spending and Black Friday, to Macy's day parade, to football, and a cool construction out of soda cans.

So now you have a nice choice of activities to do this week.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.