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Vetted resources educators can use to teach the concepts and skills in this topic.
| Name |
Description |
| Catch Me If You Can: Engineering Design Challenge: | In this lesson, 5th grade students work in small groups on a STEM challenge that involves science and math standards related to the water cycle, as well as learning the engineering design process. |
| Weathering Weather: | This is a design challenge lesson allowing students to utilize their understanding of climate zones to design a tropical roof that would withstand the wind and water generated by a hurricane. This lesson also allows you to assess students understanding of operations with decimals to create their design under a given budget. |
| Icky, Icky, No More Slicky: | In this lesson, 5th grade students will build an engineering device to separate oil from water in a simulated oil spill. Students will have an opportunity to learn about the impact that humans can have on the environment, both positively and negatively.
This is an Engineering Design Challenge that is best used after a unit or lesson that is aligned to science standards on solving problems or materials which dissolve in water. This challenge provides students a means to use their knowledge of the way materials will or will not dissolve in water to create and design an oil spill removal tool while learning the Engineering Design Process and being exposed to the field of engineering. This lesson is not intended as an initial introduction to the standard and would be best utilized as a culmination lesson. |
| The Coasta with the Mosta: | Students will create an exciting and thrilling roller coaster model. Students will use their knowledge of forces to build a model of a roller coaster using foam insulation and a marble. |
| When the Wind Blows: | This is an engineering design process lesson that covers forces and motion. It is designed to engage students using hands-on problem solving strategies. |
| Bottling Rockets: | In this lesson, students will explore the concepts of force and motion as they use the engineering design process to create and test rockets. Students will demonstrate their understanding of familiar forces by creating and presenting a poster. Take students up, up, and away with this engaging lesson! |
| From Trash to Treasure - An Engineering Design Challenge: | This lesson gives students hands-on experience with sorting mixtures based on their properties. The students will relate these science standards to a real-world problem of eliminating trash in land fills. They will have to purchase the tools they use to create their assembly line to sort the garbage within the budget provided. |
| Bridge Over Troubled Waters: | In this engineering lesson, students will design and construct a bridge that will be free-standing and support a toy car. |
| Medic Mass Landing: Engineering Design Challenge: | In this lesson, 5th grade students work in small groups on a STEM challenge that involves science and math standards related to force, motion, and measurement, as well as learning the engineering design process. |
| How Much Did I Earn? Division with Decimals: | This lesson will introduce division of decimals using place value decomposition. Students will use base 10 blocks, division strategies and place value knowledge to divide decimals by whole numbers. |
| Where on Earth is (teacher name)?!: | Students practice converting metric and customary measurements, while helping their teacher travel on summer vacation in Europe. |
| Shopping for My Trip to the Beach: | This lesson will provide practice in adding/subtracting decimals in money form. Student will model with base-ten blocks and then using the standard algorithm, through the hundredths place. This is not an introductory lesson. Students should already have conceptual knowledge and practice adding four-digit numbers using manipulatives or other methods. |
| Area Models to Algorithms: | Students will investigate the standard algorithm of two-digit by two-digit multiplication and how it connects and relates to the area model. This will provide an introduction to the standard algorithm. |
| Dividing for Equal Groups: | This lesson is meant to help solidify division understanding before teaching the standard algorithm. Given a situational story, students will use base 10 blocks to model division in order to solve problems. It may be used for 4th or 5th grade depending on the size of the divisor. |
| Make a Funny Partial Quotient Division Story: | This lesson introduces students to the area model and the partial quotient model to solve division problems with 2-digit divisors. Students are asked to apply both strategies to solve funny division problems that they help create by inserting information that is left blank in the story problems. |
| Multiplying Decimals: Finding Part of a Whole: | This is an introductory lesson for this concept. Students will use area models to show that multiplying a whole number by a decimal creates a product that is only part of the original whole. |
| Deft Drawings for Decimal Division: | In this lesson, students divide decimals to hundredths in real-world word problems by drawing illustrations based on place value and explaining the reasoning used. |
| Where Will We Stay?: | In this lesson, students explore lodging options for their dream family vacation. Students will plan a vacation for a family of four. With a budget of $5,000 students will prepare a budget to include the cost of transportation, lodging, and attractions. In this lesson, students will focus on preparing the budget for hotel costs. In lesson 1 of this unit lesson, students prepared a budget for transportation. In the subsequent lesson to this one, students will prepare a budget for the entertainment/attractions costs portion of their vacation. Teachers can choose to do one, some, or all lessons as they can be completed independently of one another. |
| Blessings in a Bag!!: | In this MEA, the students will help a charitable organization select 5 snack items from a list to provide nutritious snacks for children in low-income communities. Students will practice using the four operations to solve real-world problems and use decimal notation to make calculations involving money. Additionally, they will be asked to compare multi-digit numbers to the thousandths. |
| Getting the Top Mini-Fridge not a Small Deal: | In this MEA, students will create a procedure to rank five mini-refrigerators to determine which one should be purchased for the school by the PTA based on size, type, features, energy usage, and cost. In the process, students will solve real-world problems involving the multiplication of multi-digit numbers with decimals to the hundredths, including using money. Students will also determine the volume of a rectangular prism using a formula. |
| Workouts That Work: | Students will create a rating system for workout DVD's according to weight loss, muscle toning, and increased physical condition.
Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Keeping Your Cool With Your Lunch Bag: | On this MEA activity, students will create a procedure to rank five lunch bags as to which one is the best in keeping food and drinks at a safe temperature and appealing to the taste, while keeping design and price on target.
Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Evan's Family Vacation: | Evan needs your help convincing his parents to rent a car for their family's vacation to Washington D.C. His parents are thinking of traveling in the family's old SUV that has no air and horrible gas mileage. Students will be asked to estimate each rental car's gas costs along with the weekly rental fee to rank the choices. In the twist, the students will be given safety information and must decide how to change their procedure with the new information. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| To Oregon by Wagon: | Students work in teams to plan the contents of a covered wagon for a family relocating from Missouri to Oregon. Students must calculate the weight and cost of the wagon by adding, subtracting, and multiplying with decimals. |
| Museum Dilemma: | In this MEA, students evaluate the contributions of various explorers to help a museum select the subject who provided the most impact on Western development for a new exhibit. Students will need to convert units to have the necessary information to help come up with a solution to the problem. |
| Out to Lunch: Decimal Operations with a Menu: | In this lesson students work toward fluency with decimal operations by using a snack bar menu and going "Out to Lunch" with a friend. |
| Cracking the Code: A Division Challenge: | In this lesson, students will use their knowledge of division and division strategies to solve problems that have been written in a code where numbers are replaced with symbols. The students are challenged to find out how the traditional algorithm strategy works and how it compares to other strategies they already know. Students are also charged with creating a list of mathematical tools that help make solving division problems easier. |
| A Tasty Treat: | In this lesson, students will be given a list of ingredients and prices they must use to create their own snack mix. Students will have to add, subtract, multiply, and divide decimal numbers. The closure of the lesson focuses specifically on the division strategies students used to solve the problem. |
| Currency Craze!: | If I travel to Italy, can I buy a raspberry gelato with a $5.00 bill? Students will understand that other countries use currencies different from the United States, and that when visiting those countries, exchange rates are used to determine the value of the United States dollar (USD). This lesson integrates Mathematics with Social Studies as the students apply their knowledge of decimals and basic operations with their passports for a real-world application. |
| Chance Product: | Are you trying to deepen your students understanding of 2-digit by 2-digit multiplication? Then this is the game for you. This game allows students to demonstrate their abilities in multiplication and reasoning. Students will place numbers drawn onto a recording sheet in order to create the largest product possible. |
| Balls Galore: Evaluating Playground Ball Companies: | This MEA gives the students the opportunity to evaluate and rank several playground ball companies based on their use in a summer camp program. Students should use multiplication to determine the total cost of the balls for each company. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Estimating Decimal Products: | In this lesson, students will learn to estimate decimal products using different strategies to arrive at compatible numbers. They will learn that estimates will vary depending on the strategy chosen and that the closer the compatible numbers are to the actual factors, the closer the estimate will be to the exact answer. Students will also learn that estimation is used to solve problems that don't require exact answers and to check exact answers for reasonableness. |
| Easy as Pie Division!: | This is a hands-on lesson to show the relationship between division and multiplication. It provides a different method for solving long division that my students love. |
| Better Buy: 75 fl oz or 150 fl oz?: | The students will clip out advertisements or use the attached PowerPoint to determine the better buy between small quantities and large quantities. The students will answer the question, "Which item costs less per unit?" and demonstrate fluency in dividing with decimals. |
| The Mystery of Decimals: | This lesson reviews all four operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing) with decimals. It is designed to easily provide differentiated instruction for students. The culmination of the lesson is a computer-based assessment which provides a fun change from a typical pencil and paper test. |
| Diving deeper into division: | This lesson introduces students to dividing with 2 digit divisors. Students are asked to apply strategies that they learned in dividing with 1 digit divisors such as partial quotients or breaking numbers apart using the distributive property. |
| What Are They Thinking? Understanding Division: | This lesson uses a discovery approach to exploring the meaning of division. The students will utilize math practice standards as they analyze math solutions and explain their own solutions. Since the lesson analyzes division, it is a sound lesson to use to check student understanding before introducing efficient division algorithms. |
| Banana County Public School-Painters MEA: | This Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) is written at a 4th grade level.
This activity allows students to think critically using information provided. Students will write a procedure on how they determined which painting company would be suitable for the client.
Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Dividing Decimals Investigations: | In this introductory lesson, students test how the basic operations performed on the dividend and divisor affect the quotient of a pair of numbers. Students then conclude whether the results of their trials can be applied to solve problems with a decimal divisor. |
| “Dinner with Friends”: | The students will determine what to order at a dinner with friends yet stay within a budget. The students will try to maximize their budgets and order as much food as they possibly can with their given amount of money. |
| Wallpaper Woes Money Math: Lessons for Life: | Students hear a story about a middle-school student who wants to redecorate his bedroom. They measure the classroom wall dimensions, draw a scale model, and incorporate measurements for windows and doors to determine the area that could be covered by wallpaper. Students then hear more about the student's redecorating adventure and learn about expenses, budget constraints, and tradeoffs. |
| Race to Fill the Whole!: | In this engaging lesson, students will play a game using base ten blocks to add decimals to the hundredths. |
| Sunshine Beach Restaurant: | This Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) asks students to develop a procedure to select a hurricane shutter company based on several data points.
Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. MEAs resemble engineering problems and encourage students to create solutions in the form of mathematical and scientific models. Students work in teams to apply their knowledge of science and mathematics to solve an open-ended problem, while considering constraints and tradeoffs. Students integrate their ELA skills into MEAs as they are asked to clearly document their thought process. MEAs follow a problem-based, student centered approach to learning, where students are encouraged to grapple with the problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. To learn more about MEA’s visit: https://www.cpalms.org/cpalms/mea.aspx |
| The 20 Second Game: | This is a game students will love to play to improve their understanding of estimating decimal products and increase speed when finding these estimations. The game can be modified to practice estimating products of whole numbers, quotients of whole numbers, and quotients of decimals. |
Vetted resources students can use to learn the concepts and skills in this topic.
Vetted resources caregivers can use to help students learn the concepts and skills in this topic.
