This Week’s Anton Lesson Plan
With all the focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs in school, the “M” part of this acronym continues to be a crucial part of every student’s curriculum. To that end, this subject has a role in the makeup of newspapers and the their place in culture. Numbers are found in budget stories, calculating winning percentages for teams in the sports section and even determining the amount of people who may be affected by various government policies.
The following are exercises students can do to get a taste of the role mathematics plays in your newspaper.
• Challenge your students to create math problems from this week’s newspaper. Exchange those with another student and solve.
• Scan the newspaper for examples of perpendicular, parallel and intersecting lines. Use a marker to highlight the lines.
• Research the monetary unit of a foreign country. Find the current value of that currency in the newspaper or on the Internet. Determine the cost of five items listed in display advertisements in your newspaper to the foreign currency.
• Find an advertisement in the newspaper that lists a sale price and a regular price. Calculate the percentage of discount. In ads where the discount rate is given, calculate the selling price.
