5 End of the Year Projects for your Math Class

1) Stock Market Activity

I actually turn this into a full week activity. I start by showing a Shark Tank episode, to help students understand ‘ownership of a company.’ Which we will correlate to ‘stock.’

Then we talk about the stock market and practice purchasing stocks together.

Finally, I give the students $100,000!!! (just in theory, nothing tangible) and a handful of stocks that they are allowed to purchase. I usually preselect ones they know of: McDonalds, Wendy’s, Amazon, Apple, WalMart, Target, etc.

I set the parameters that they must spend between $90,000 and $100,000 (in case some students decide to purchase 1 stock of one company and avoid the purpose of the activity). I also mandate that they must purchase stocks in 3 different companies (no more, no less) – this also eliminates a lot of issues.

We then track the stock for the entire week, making new calculations each day to see how much money we have made or lost.

If you’re feeling really adventurous, you can have them create a line graph of how much money they have each day.

For a more detailed explanation and resources, read our article below:

2) Create a Board Game

I challenge my students to create a board game that has math in it. I give them several days of class time to develop the game, and then we spend the last day playing them.

The most usual version is a trail from start to finish, and students move by answering math questions.

But here’s some more ideas to get the brain juices flowing:

– integer operation battleship

– math jenga

– multiplication squares

– number sense games

3) Story Board – Sir Cumference

We read the story “Sir Cumference and the First Round Table,” or I play the YouTube video below of someone else reading the story.

Then students must draw the three main characters (1) Sir Cumference (2) Lady Di of Ameter (3) Radius. They must also write the definitions of all three terms, and draw a circle and correctly label them.

For an extensions students must create a 6 frame story board of the events in the story.

4) Candy Wrapper Scale Drawings

I’ve never done this one, but some of my colleagues have. The students create large scale drawings of a candy wrapper and then post them on the wall. They look very cool all posted together. The link below (not from our website) has a lesson plan and resources to implement the game. Click the link below.

https://www.rcboe.org/cms/lib/GA01903614/Centricity/Domain/4360/Candy%20Bar%20Englargement%20Scale%20Drawing%20MASTER.pdf