As the Thanksgiving season approaches, it’s the perfect time to infuse some holiday spirit into your upper-grade math lessons! By incorporating Thanksgiving-themed math activities, you engage students and reinforce essential mathematical concepts in a fun and festive way. Here are eleven Thanksgiving math activities your students will be thankful for!
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Thanksgiving Dinner Math Project
This real-world math project is perfect in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. In this engaging math project, students will plan their Thanksgiving meal from start to finish.
This easy-to-use project includes everything you need… recipes, grocery ads, and more. It is available in whole or decimal numbers. You can read more about this best-selling project here. Take a closer look at each project by clicking the link below.
If you have students needing extra support when completing computation tasks, download this free place-value toolkit. It is easy to build and a great differentiation tool for your students. Grab it here!
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Pumpkin Pie Fractions
Explore fractions through pie! You can use donated pies and have students complete fraction activities with pie slices. You can explore equivalent fractions, compare fractions and fractional sizes, or add and subtract fractions with pie slices. Don’t want to use actual pies? Just print out pie images and use them!
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Thanksgiving Elapsed Time
Anyone who has hosted Thanksgiving knows that time management is critical. Planning Thanksgiving makes it the perfect time to practice elapsed time.
All you need to do is give your students some time parameters (When does their meal need to be ready?) Then, provide students with various Thanksgiving Day activities (i.e., cooking the turkey, making pies, setting the table, watching the parade) and the length of time each activity takes, and then watch your students plan out their day. This real-world math activity is a great way to practice elapsed time.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Thanksgiving Color by Number
Are you looking for an engaging, no-prep activity? Check out these Thanksgiving-themed color-by-number activities.
Three different activities are included that practice multi-digit addition and subtraction.
Each activity consists of three versions to meet a variety of learner needs.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Turkey-Trot Measurements
Does your school do a turkey trot? You could also set up a turkey trot for younger students in the schoolyard. Either way, ask your students to help with the measurements. They can practice converting measurements or help measure the course. No matter what, this is a fun way to get students moving and practice their measurement skills.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Food Graphs
What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food? Graph it! You can collect data regarding everyone’s favorite foods to eat on Thanksgiving and then have students create graphs that represent the data.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Word problems
Word problems are an easy way to practice various math skills while incorporating Thanksgiving themes. You can give your students word problems about cooking times, cooking measurements, parade floats, grocery shopping, football scores, and more.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Parade Float Measurements
For many Americans, the Thanksgiving Day parade is an annual Thanksgiving tradition. Did you know that there is a website that has each float’s measurements? Use the balloon float measurements to complete a variety of math tasks. Students can convert measurements or even scale them and make their floats.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Logic Puzzles
These logic puzzles are a no-prep, differentiated activity leading to Thanksgiving that will help your students build their critical thinking skills.
Ten puzzles, each with four differentiated versions, will help your students develop their problem-solving skills.
Check out the puzzles with whole numbers or decimal numbers.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Black Friday Shopping
Black Friday comes with so many ads! Use those ads to practice math skills. You can give your students a budget and have them use the ads to shop for others. Or you can have them calculate sale percentages and see if they are getting a good deal on the sale.
Thanksgiving Math Activities: Tangrams
Create some hands-on fun in your classroom using tangrams to create Thanksgiving images this Thanksgiving. You can find a variety of tangram mats to use, or have your students get creative and create their own!
Grab one (or multiple) of these Thanksgiving math activities and plug them into your lesson plans. They are a great way to keep your students engaged and keep you sane as you head into the holiday season. This Thanksgiving, let’s give thanks for the joy of learning and the endless possibilities for mathematical exploration!
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