Newspaper Search

Search through the newspaper for mathematical data.

What you'll need

Newspaper

What to do


1. Numbers in the news. Find the following things in the paper:

A graph

A number less than 10

Something that comes in 2s, 3s, 4s

A number more than 50 the days of the week

A number more than 100

A number that is more than 100 but less than 999

A symbol or word for inches, feet, or yards, or centimeters and meters

A schedule of some kind

A triangle

A weather symbol

A percent sign

Sports statistics

2. List it. Provide your child with supermarket advertisements in order to make up a list of food that will feed the family for a week and meet a budget of a certain amount of money. Have your child make a chart and use a calculator to work out the cost of more than one item. If the total for the groceries is too great, talk about which items can be eliminated. Could the list be cut down by a few items or by buying less of another item? What will best serve the needs of the family?

3. For a fraction of the cost. Give your child a few coupons and supermarket ads from the paper. Help your child match the coupons to some of the items in the advertisement. What fraction of the cost is the coupon? For example, if an item costs 79 cents and the coupon is for 10 cents off, what fraction of the cost can be saved? (About 1/8.) What percentage are you saving on the item? (About 12 1/2 percent.)

One of the main ways people use numbers is for planning. Knowing how to plan how much things will cost before going to the shop and how to read schedules and weather information from the paper will help your child understand the world.