3 Activities for Thanksgiving
- Sarah Stecher
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Congrats on making it through the longest, most harrowing portion of the school year! We want to help get you in the Thanksgiving spirit with some fun math puzzles that can be used in any high school math class. If you've been around for a while, you know how much we LOVE a good math task! When they're themed for the holidays (like Valentine's Day or Halloween), that's an extra bonus. Today we’ll share with you three brand new Thanksgiving-themed puzzles, perfect for those weird pockets of time that make up a short week of school.
Why Use These Activities?
It's unlikely that these activities are going to exactly match the content you're teaching this week. So why use them? These tasks are considered non-curriculuar tasks, not becuase they don't involve math (they do! And a lot of it!), but because they don't necessarily match where you are in your specific curriculum. Non-curricular tasks are good for:
Getting students thinking creatively
Reviewing prior skills
Planting seeds for future lessons where more formal methods for solving these puzzles may be introduced
Reinforcing group norms
Disrupting patterns of participation and non-participation that may have gotten established (even unintentionally)
Honoring diverse ways of thinking
Plus, who doesn't want a little bit of fun on the week of Thanksgiving? Let's dig into the 3 activities.
Activity 1: Slice by Slice
Areas of sectors & proportional reasoning
This math task is composed of two pie-related problems about sectors. In Part 1, students are given information about a large Costco pie, and need to find the size of the slice that would be worth a certain amount of money. Note that nowhere in this problem are students actually needing to calculate area – they are using various units to consider "what fraction of the whole do we have?" and then connecting this to the angle made at the tip of the slice (the central angle) based on its relation to 360˚. Of course, some students might use the calculation for the area of a slice to reason through the problem. Many solution paths are possible on this one! Finding the weight of the slice is a very similar calculation. The picture shows that the whole pie weighs 58 ounces or 3.63 pounds. You may need to give this information to students if it is hard to see on your printed copies.
In Part 2, students are given information about two different sized pies and need to determine the central angle of a slice of the smaller pie that has the same area as one slice of the larger pie.
Download Sample Solutions
Note: The sample student answers illustrate proportional reasoning and making the problem easier by using $6 as the price, rather than $5.99. These are problem solving strategies we want to encourage in our students! It is worth discussing whether this simplification alters the answers in significant ways (our vote is no!).
Activity 2: Thanksgiving Baskets
Problem solving & rates
In this activity, students are given information about how fast two people could pack a set of 36 baskets, and then must determine their individual rates. There are many ways to go about solving this and the methods vary in formality. You will definitely want to try this one yourself before giving it to students. For students writing systems of equations, help students define their variables carefully. Students often struggle to identify whether their variable means the number of baskets packed in one hour, or the time it takes to pack one basket, and they may even switch the meaning of their variable when writing different equations. Here are some questions you could use while monitoring student work:
What information do we have? What information do we need?
Based on the information in the prompt, who packs baskets the fastest? The slowest? How do you know?
What does your variable represent?
How does the time it takes to pack one basket relate to the number of baskets that can be made in a given interval of time?
Download
Solution: Ravi packs 7.5 boxes in one hour.
Activity 3: Turkey Trot
Looking for and making use of structure (MP7)
We love a visual pattern task around here and this one we just made is a new favorite! Before you give this task to students, brainstorm multiple ways you think students might see the pattern growing. One question to ask students is where the new turkeys are from one figure to the next. Students will very likely have different answers here depending on how they interpret the shape of the pattern. When coming up with an explicit formula for Figure n, keep in mind that the structure of the equation reveals something about how they see the pattern. This is about more than just manipulating equations to show algebraic equivalence! For example, students who see the pattern as having two duplicate parts might write the formula as 2[n(n+1)+1], seeing each of the repeated parts as an n by (n+1) rectangle with one extra on the edge. Students who see the pattern as one complete whole might consider shifting the bottom half to the left one, and writing the pattern as (n+1)(2n)+2, seeing the whole as an (n+1) by (2n) rectangle with two extra turkeys on the corners. Another interpretation might be to see two
n x n squares, then two columns of n and then 2 extra, leading to the expression 2n^2 +2n+2. Challenge students to connect their equation to the visual (see page 2 of the sample solutions for some illustrations of these solutions.) Highlighters and colored pencils can be really helpful here. Students may attempt to write a table of values and then fit a quadratic expression to it, but this is not the intent of the activity.