Extra! Extra! by Michael Naylor

Read all about these awesome math activities that involve the newspaper

The newspaper is a rich source of mathematics for the classroom. Many newspaper companies will donate papers to schools. If you're already using newspapers in your classroom for current events, why not try one of these math activities as well?

Grades K-2
Comic sort
Cut out and separate the panels of several comic strips and challenge your students to reconstruct the events. Ask them to explain their thinking. You can laminate the pieces to make durable comics puzzles for your students to use in your classroom.

Greatest and least
Ask your students to pair up and provide a sheet of newspaper for each pair. Have them find the least and greatest number on each page. Discuss different types of numbers – did any students spot fractions or decimals?

Chart the weather
Clip out the weather forecast for each day and tape it onto a chart. At the end of each week, determine whether there were more sunny or cloudy days, which day was the hottest, etc.

Grades 3-5
Measure the gym
Ask your students to estimate how many sheets of newspaper it takes to cover the floor of the school gym. Place students in groups and supply each group with a stack of newspapers and a mission: Measure the floor as accurately as possible. Only one group should measure a side at a time.

Number hunt
Have your students attempt to find the following number-related items in the newspaper: (a) a number greater than one million, (b) a fraction, (c) a decimal, (d) an average, (e) a percentage.

Shopping spree
Give each student a budget of $30 to "spend" on items in advertisements. They should try to have less than one dollar remaining.

Grades 3-8
Fold the newspaper
Ask your students to guess how many times they think a double sheet of newspaper can be successively folded in half. Then let them try. Surprisingly, it's very difficult to get as few as seven folds! Ask your class to make a T-chart showing the number of folds and the total thickness of the paper. Does this help explain why so few folds are possible? For grades 5-8, add a column for area and ask them to write formulas for the thickness of paper on the nth fold.

Letter frequency
Assign each student a paragraph of a news story and have them count the number of each vowel. Pool the classroom results and discuss. With older children, use all of the letters of the alphabet to determine the top five most-used letters.

Grades 5-8
Sports statistics
The sports pages are full of statistics – discuss the many different kinds of data and explain how averages work. Have students follow a local team and prepare a report explaining their team's percentages.

Grades 6-8
Layout percents
Give each student one sheet from a newspaper and a ruler. Ask them to determine the percentage of space used for stories, pictures, ads and headlines. Compare results across the class. Are the results the same for similar portions of the paper?

Sale prices
Ask each student to find five items being advertised at a discount and determine both the dollar value of the discount and the percentage off (savings ÷ total price). Which student found the greatest percentage? The greatest dollar savings?

Crossword fractions
What percent of the crossword puzzle is white squares? Black squares?

Other Treats
Teach your students to read the newspaper's index to find sections and page numbers. Also, many papers have crossword puzzles and other puzzles such as Sudoku, word searches, word scrambles, chess problems, etc. Show your students how to find these puzzles – you never know what kind of good habits may form!

Michael Naylor is a professor of math education at Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA.