Thanksgiving is the perfect time to bring real world math into your middle school classroom. There is so much math application opportunities that involve family meals, grocery shopping, recipes and even the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, making November a great time to show how math is used in everyday life.
Here are four easy ways to add meaningful Thanksgiving math activities to your lessons.
Use Grocery Ads to Plan a Thanksgiving Dinner
Have students use online grocery ads or printed store flyers to plan a Thanksgiving meal. Start by having them estimate the total cost of ingredients before calculating the actual price.
Students can create a poster or digital presentation showing:
Their Thanksgiving menu
The cost of each ingredient
the total cost of the meal
Ways they could save money or stay within a budget
This activity helps students practice estimate, decimals, addition and budgeting while making real world connections.
Scale Up a Favorite Family Recipe
Ask students to bring in a favorite family recipe that is commonly served during the holidays. You could also do a quick google search and print out recipes ahead of time. Students then double or triple the recipe amounts and organize the information into a chart.
Their chart could include:
Ingredient name
Original amount
Doubled amount
Tripled amount
Have students also included the number of servings for each recipe and what happens when ingredients are doubled and tripled.
This activity provides authentic practice with fractions, multiplication and proportional reasoning while connecting math to family traditions.
Explore the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Through Math
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade offers countless opportunities for real world math.
Students can:
Research the dimensions of parade balloons and floats
Create word problems based on their findings
Compare the sizes of different floats
Design their own float and calculate its volume or surface area
Because many students are familiar with the parade, this activity is a fun way to bring geometry and measurement concepts to life. The Macy’s Parade website has lots of great numerical information. Check it out here.
Create Thanksgiving Themed Word Problems
Have students create their own Thanksgiving themed math problems using grocery ads, recipes, holiday travel, or Thanksgiving dinner planning as inspiration.
Provide each student with a piece of construction paper folded in half:
On the outside, students write and illustrate their problem.
On the inside, have students show and explain the solution to their problem.
Hang the completed problems around the room and turn your classroom into a Thanksgiving Math Gallery Walk where students solve one another’s problems.
For more structure, assign specific topics such as:
Fractions
Percent discounts
Decimals
Ratios
Unit Rates
Students will love seeing their classmates solve the problems they created.
Looking for No-Prep Thanksgiving Math Activities?
If you’re looking for ready to use Thanksgiving math resources check out these classroom tested activities from my TpT shop!
