Math and Sports Activity Bundle: Ratios and Proportions
Students will be surprised to learn how much math is used in their favorite sports. Each activity will get your kids out of their seats and playing paper football, running a relay race, or measuring their heart rate!
Grades: 5th - 9th
Teaching Duration: 3 hours
“I like that this spans more than one content area and can be used in math class for additional fun if the elective teachers aren’t able to incorporate it.”
lesson overview
Engaging activities connecting math concepts to sports! Instead of boring worksheets, students will solve problems based on their own collected data and connect the concepts to cool careers!
Students will be surprised to learn how much math is used in their favorite sports. Each activity will get your kids out of their seats and playing paper football, running a relay race, or measuring their heart rate! Each activity also includes a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) career connection that will help students see why math is useful in real life.
Each activity will take about 45 - 60 minutes to complete depending on student level. The activities are perfect as an in-class assignment, review activity, homework assignment, or extracurricular activity. Activities are focused on ratios and proportions concepts. Each activity includes an introduction, career connection section, discussion questions, word problems, and extension critical thinking questions.
Activity 1: "Heart Rate Math"
Students learn about heart rate and the importance of this number in sports medicine. They compute their own heart rate after various activities and graph the results. They calculate the target heart rate and answer critical thinking questions.
Activity 2: "Sports Scores"
Students learn how their favorite sports calculate common statistics like batting average or throwing accuracy. Students then play a game of paper football to find their own field goal accuracy!
Activity 3: "Relay Race"
Students complete calculations for a set of relay race times then they hold their own race! Using common classroom items, they time the race and calculate various ratio problems such as "keeping the same pace, how long would it take to run 3 miles?"
