4 Thanksgiving Math Activities Your Students Will Love -

My school calendar has almost always forced me to teach Monday and Tuesday (and sometimes Wednesday!) the week of Thanksgiving. It’s such an awkward amount of time—and who wants to start something new right before a holiday break? Especially when it’s going to be a struggle to keep students engaged!

So I like to “lean in” to some of the craziness at this time of year, and plan some engaging Thanksgiving math activities! Whether you only have time to do one Thanksgiving math worksheet, or you have an entire math block to dedicate to a hands-on activity… I’ve got an activity for you!

Keep reading to find out some of my favorite Thanksgiving themed math activities!

1. Riddles

These riddle worksheets are perfect when you need something that is ZERO prep, self-checking, and can be used for so many different things

Riddles are great low prep Thanksgiving math activities

I’ve used these riddles as:

Morning work
Sub plans
Early finisher activities
Math centers
Homework
…and so much more!

Whether you teach 3rd grade, 4th grade, or 5th grade, these riddles are perfect for adding a simple review activity to your November Plans! Each set of riddles includes 4 pages of math practice, each paired with a fun riddle to help students check their work.

Grab the level you need here:

2. Escape Rooms

Imagine that you’re helping your teacher to clean her classroom before Thanksgiving break. It’s time to leave and everyone has already left the building to get their Thanksgiving break started! You finish cleaning up and decide it’s time to head home to have a yummy Thanksgiving dinner with your family. BUT when you go to leave, you realize that you’ve somehow gotten locked inside of the school and can’t find your way out!

Escape rooms are such engaging Thanksgiving math activities!

This is the story behind this fun Thanksgiving escape room! This Thanksgiving math activity is perfect to use if:

You are wrapping up a unit in November and you want a fun review. Or if you want to celebrate Thanksgiving in your classroom, without having a full blown party!

To complete the escape room, students will solve 3 clues. Each clue contains a math portion, as well as a “puzzle” that must be solved. This is the perfect activity to engage your students during a time of year when behaviors get a little “tricky,” yet still giving them practice with an important math skill!

Grab the level you need here:

3. Using Recipes

Cooking is a huge part of Thanksgiving and recipes are full of math! Have students find a recipe online for their favorite Thanksgiving dish. Students should look at the ingredients list and determine how much would be needed if the recipe was doubled or even tripled!

Finding a recipe to double and triple is a great real world Thanksgiving math activity

This activity helps students practice multiplication, fractions, and even some reading skills!

4. Data Collection

If you’re working on data and graphing in your classroom, it’s so easy to practice those skills with a Thanksgiving activity! Have students come up with Thanksgiving questions that they can use to poll their classmates. For example, “How far do you travel for Thanksgiving?” or “What’s your favorite Thanksgiving dish?”.

This activity is fun because students have a chance to get creative with it! You can even differentiate it for your students by requiring them to create a certain type of graph–bar graphs, line graphs, picture graphs, and even line plots are perfect.

There you have it—a handful of Thanksgiving math activities that are perfect for November! No matter how you choose to spend the days leading up to Thanksgiving, your students will be grateful that you took the time to plan some fun activities for them!

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