SamizdatMath

You have a locked briefcase that you want to send to your friend on the other side of the country. You put a lock on it and keep the key around your neck. There is no second key, you can't duplicate this key, and you don't want to send it to your friend, because you're afraid it might get lost or stolen. How does your friend open the case? That's a question that has a lot of relevance to the use of prime numbers! But I digress: this is a set of activities designed to enhance your students' un

Nadia Geddit wanted to get into her building, but she forgot the code to the lock. However, she did remember some clues about the code. These are 5 clues about the code: 1) The sum of the fifth digit and the third digit is 14. 2) The fourth digit is one more than the second digit. 3) The first digit is one less than twice the second digit. 4) The sum of the second and third digit is 10. 5) The sum of all five digits is 30. What 5 digits must Nadia press to make the lock open? How wo

This is a very fun and motivating activity that can be done in 1 - 2 class periods, along with homework. It tells the story of an intern at a website who figures out a way to "hack" his burrito to almost twice the size by ordering "half-portions" of items like red and black beans, chicken and beef, and white and brown rice. The activity looks at how hacking each ingredient adds to the weight of the burrito through the number of additional ounces and how those additional ounces can be written as

Factoring is a very important skill in grades 4 - 8, yet our students are missing some essential skills needed to factor quickly and effectively. One of those skill is taking half of large even number quickly and accurately. This set of games will teach your students how to divide a number in half and then help them practice it until they are automatic. For example, your students may not be able to factor 96 as 3 x 32, but they should be able to perform 2 x 48, which would then become 2 x 2 x 2

You've seen photos of these store bloopers around the web, and say to yourself, "you know, this would be great to use in my class...." but you never have the photo, and you never have the time to photoshop out the brands, fix the colors, crop the image and collect it all in one place. Well, it's all been done for you, and only for the magic price of $4.95, which is nothing when you consider there are 20 different "math fails" that range from simple counting (how many nuggets are printed on that

There are three crates. The first contains only apples; the second contains only oranges, and the third contains a combination of apples and oranges. Unfortunately, all the labels on the crates are incorrect. You can take only one piece of fruit from a crate, and may not look inside while you do it. From which crate would you take a piece of fruit to find out where to put the correct labels? A man who owned a winery recently passed away. In his will, he left 21 barrels, seven of which are fille

Stop That Rat! ? Why would anyone want to "stop that rat?" Well, because it's really fun to watch your students work on this puzzle, which comes in gritty color as well as black and white. 63 pages of rat fun! Seriously, the basic puzzle is simple: take the disks which are numbered 1 - 6, and arrange them on the board so that each side adds up to 9. However, things get very interesting when you find out that you can re-arrange the 6 numbers to add up to 10, 11 and 12. But it gets better than th

Greetings Intrepid Teacher: If you’ve downloaded this preview pack and have looked at the materials already, you’re probably scratching your head and thinking, “What is wrong with this person? Why do his activities look so strange? Why do they have all these fancy designs? And why does he love Louis Jordan so much? I have no answers: I was raised in the wilds of Long Island, New York, and my background was in industrial and visual arts. I was overeducated beyond my intelligence at a prominen