Social Studies Genius!

 
  I have a teammate that is fabulous!  She is the Yin to my Yang.  When I am stressed she calms me down, and when she is stressed...I stand awkwardly by and try to make her laugh by cracking bad jokes.  Regardless of my social quirks, she allows me to be me.  A couple weeks ago I came up with an idea that was promptly shut down by the administration staff.  When she saw that I was upset and discouraged by this, she decided to humor me by putting up a social studies version of my idea.  She free hand drew the United States Map and had the students decorate/label the waterways, geographic regions, Native American tribes, and will soon be putting on explorer routes.  This got me thinking, is there a way that I could integrate mathematics into this giant social studies map?

I created two extension projects for our 30 minute intervention/extension time.  The projects are meant to last about a week each.
The Explorer's Boats has students using tangrams, calculating percentage, area of geometric shapes, and perimeter of unusual shapes.

The Native American Blankets  has students using cut up shapes from construction paper to design their own native american quilts, based upon pictures of each tribes quilt.  The project explores calculating area and perimeter of the different geometric shapes, ratios, and percentages.