My Library

FEMA presents a wealth of kid-friendly materials on each type of natural disaster. The disaster area relays information and statistics on each type of disaster in simple terms. In What's Happening Now, a clickable map brings up recent disaster information by state. In the games and quizzes area, youll find Disaster Math, a collection of word problems organized by disaster. One of the resources for parents and teachers is a listing of other disaster web sites.

This collection of lessons, geared for high school but adaptable to younger students, presents realistic applications of math skills and concepts, including managing credit cards, determining the economics of buying vs. leasing a car, accruing simple or compound interest in saving accounts, communicating data visually, calculating rectangular and rounded areas to determine the quantity of materials needed for home decorating improvements, and applying ratios, proportions, and measurement convers

Students apply math skills and concepts through online and offline architectural design activities, including "Floor Plan Your Classroom."

Mix math and music to play with rhythms and notes, bringing fractions to life.

The educational resources in this area of the National Weather Service include statistical data and summaries of severe weather by year.

Visit the gallery and "a place in time" to examine speeded-up and slowed-down time sequences.

This site offers 71 examples of real-life applications of math for upper elementary grades and above, including drawing/interpreting topographical maps, money math, creating math magic problems, measuring the heat of sand and rock; and much more. The collection can be sorted by grade range, key word, or title.

This downloadable collection of 20 real-world math projects is adaptable for upper elementary- and middle-school students.

Look for "mathematically significant" road signs, for which at least one equation can be written using all the numbers in the sign(s). Although the site is no longer accepting new road signs, it's fun to look at the existing photographs of actual street and highway signs that meet the "Road Sign Math" rules. A class could develop their own collection of road sign math photos, adopting their own rules appropriate to their grade level. For example: Look for meaningful sequences or prime numbers.

The Data Library includes data sets that can be downloaded as Excel spreadsheets, collaborative data projects, and other data sources.

This intriguing site displays distorted world maps to give a quick sense of statistics on world resources and consumption of resources, health, education, income, disease, causes of death, natural disasters, economics, pollution, transportation, and lots more. On one map, a swollen Asia shows its proportion of the worlds population; on another map, a swollen United States shows its share of carbon emissions. Some maps are historical, so (for example) comparisons of population or wealth for diffe