Since their debut on 21 December 1913 in the New York World newspaper, crosswords have intrigued and delighted puzzle solvers. Much care is taken to edit these puzzles to present challenging clues as well as to produce grids that are consistent in their visual presentation.

As the Major League Baseball season comes to a close this fall and fans eagerly anticipate the World Series, you and your students can explore the mathematics of baseball with It's a Hit.

What's black and white with math all over? A newspaper, of course! How can you help your students apply fraction, decimal, percent, area, and ratio concepts while investigating a real-world task? Once again, the answer involves using a newspaper. A newspaper is not just for reading. Your local newspaper has many examples of real-world applications of mathematics, such as graphs, charts, sports statistics, and mathematics examples found in advertisements. In this activity, your students will flex their mathematical muscles and apply fraction, decimal, and ratio concepts to determine what percentage of your local newspaper is really news.

Capitalize on student interest in sports with this classroom-ready investigation of mean. Means are often used to compare athletes’ performances in sports. Avid student fans may know statistics for their favorite team or players, but do they know how these stats are determined? This activity explores the application of mean in baseball and basketball.

What do President James Garfield and Pythagoras have in common? They were both lovers of mathematics, and in 1876, James Garfield constructed an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem. "Constructing Pythagoras," a hands-on investigation, challenges your students to derive the Pythagorean theorem (a²+ b²= c²) using the same proof as the USA's twentieth president, James Garfield.