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The Twelve
Math Days of Christmas - Easy As Pi!
Dateline: 12/11/06
By Susan Jarema, Googol Learning
The holidays are here, the kids are at home and families are
spending more time together. Here's your chance to make your
family time a learning time by incorporating math into your busy
holiday schedule. Math can be found in all sorts of activities
we do in this season. Learning to combine math in your daily
routine is one of the best ways to help your child develop strong
math skills. Here are 12 great ways to combine math in your Christmas
activities.
1. Santa Claus
Tracking Santa's
big trip is a great exercise in geography, cartography, distance,
speed, temperature and time zones.
- How far
is it to the North Pole?
- What's
the temperature at the North Pole?
- Does
Santa have any daylight?
- How
far does Santa have to travel?
- How
fast is he going?
- What
if Santa had to travel to the moon?
- Why
can't we find Santa?
- Maybe he actually lives at the magnetic North Pole, which changes every year!
2. Christmas Baking
- Take your favorite recipe, double
it, convert
it to metric and use only a teaspoon and a quarter cup to
measure.
- Use an oven thermometer to compare the actual temperature
with the stove setting.
- Convert this
to Celsius.
- By the way, how
long does it take a turkey to cook, measured
in seconds?
3. Christmas Budget
Get everyone to prepare
a shopping budget and stick to it! Teach the kids how to
use a spreadsheet.
Compare your actual expenditures with your budget at the end.
Bonus points go to anyone who spends less!
4. Christmas Lights
- How many Christmas
lights are decorating your house?
- How many extra
watts of power are they using?
- How about on your street, in the neighborhood, your city,
the
world?
5. Christmas Countdown
- Count
down and chart the days until the big day.
- Make your own advent calendar.
- Have older kids include
minutes and seconds.
6. Wrapping Presents
- Have your tape measure handy to measure
the dimensions of the package.
- How
much wrapping paper will you need?
- Try estimating.
- Why not make
your own wrapping paper, using tessellations!
7. Christmas Trees and Snowflakes
- Explore symmetry
and fractals
by talking about snowflakes
and Christmas
trees.
- Create
your own decorations.
- Don't forget to measure
the height of your Christmas tree using trigonometry!
8. Christmas Cards
- Make up your own Christmas
card puzzles in cryptarithm.
- Decorate the cover with a tangram,
candle,
dove
or other thematic creation.
9. Ornaments and Decorations
- Construct your own polyhedral
paper ornaments for the tree.
- Create patterns as you string
popcorn and cranberries
to decorate the tree.
- Make some Wrapping Paper Stars and recyle gift wrap scraps.
10. The Twelve Days of Christmas
- How
many gifts in all are given in the song?
- Try using Pascal's Triangle
to find out.
- By the way, what would you prefer - the twelve gifts, or
$1
doubled for 12 days?
- What about $12
each day for 12 days? (That's twelve factorial)!
11. Holiday Calorie Count
- Are
you eating more than normal?
- Try tracking what
you eat along with your activities for the day, charting
the calories consumed and burned.This requires both measuring
and arithmetic.
- Demonstrate your results on a bar
graph.
- This is a great time to also discuss nutrition
and health.
- Do candy
canes count as a red
vegetable?
And finally...
12. Unwrapping Gifts (and Math)
Well, I doubt that anyone will be in the mood, but here goes!
- Determine the probability
that Dad gets a tie.
- Estimate
and time
how long it takes to unwrap all the presents.
- Compare and contrast this with how
long it took to wrap them.
- Chart
the number of gifts received versus those given.
- Estimate
and weigh the bags of recycled wrapping paper.
- Explore nets
with the extra boxes, and measure them using cubits.
- Sort your gifts into Venn
diagrams and make a pie
chart to illustrate your findings.
- Line up all the Christmas
chocolates into arrays; sort, group and put them into sets
 .
- Use the leftover ribbon to explore topology
and create a gigantic mobius
strip.
- Try to build a rhombicosidodecahedron
out of the recycled
wrapping paper or just take a short break from math.
Now wasn't that as easy
as Pi? You'll soon be finding math everywhere and having googols
of fun!
Visit our Christmas Math section for information,
links, and downloads for all of these activities!
Susan Jarema is the founder of Googol Learning and the Crazy
4 Math Contest. The Learning with Googol Power Website has
many free resources to inspire mathematics and family learning
in your home through music, games, stories and layered learning.
Visit www.googolpower.com for more information on workshops,
presentations, the award-winning Googol Power Math Series and
Discovery Multiplication Program.
This article may be reprinted from the Google
Learning Website with the above author credit and website
link.
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- Books To Help You have fun and learn
through the holidays
-
- Celebrate
the Winter Hoidays : Sensational Activities & Helpful Background
Information That Help Kids Learn About & Appreciate Five
Important holidays
by Elaine Israel
- Dozens of festive ideas! Take time to celebrate! Honor all
cultures!
Celebrate all the winter holidays with this BIG resource filled
with read-aloud stories, poems, playlets, fun art project, ready-to-go
games, easy recipes, and more!
-
- The
Physics of Christmas : From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the
Thermodynamics of Turkey
by Roger Highfield
- Highfield presents an amusing, eclectic, and trivia-filled
collection of scientific observations about one of the Western
world's most beloved holidays.
-
- Deck the Halls With Buddy Holly : And Other
Misheard Christmas Lyrics
- by Gavin Edwards
- "Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, you'll go drown in
Listerine," "We wish you a very crisp mess," and
"O come, hoggy faithful." - from the master of the
misheard.
-
- A Christmas Carol
by Stephen Krensky, et al
- Scrooge was a miser. His money was his life. Then, one Christmas
Eve, Scrooge received a trio of visitors who showed him not only
the true meaning of Christmas, but the true meaning of his life
as well.
-
- Skipping
Christmas
- by John Grisham
- While this book is not about doing away with Christmas forever,
it's one couple's desire to just skip it, for just one year,
and spend the money on a cruise instead. But it's the end of
the book where the true meaning of Christmas will be exhibited.
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