In the spirit of St. Patrick's Day, students at Birch Lane Elementary School in the Massapequa Public School District took part in an exciting lesson when Lisa McKillop, a math support teacher, visited grades 3-6 to use the holiday as a teachable moment while engaging the students in learning.

To begin the activity, students discussed the meaning of "worth its weight in gold," relating this adage to what they value in their lives. To connect the activity to the math skills students have been studying, they had the option of weighing themselves on a scale and rounding their weight to the nearest pound, then converting their weight in pounds to troy ounces, which is the unit of measure used to weigh gold.

To begin the activity, Mrs. McKillop used SMART Board technology to access the World Wide Web in order to research with students the current value of gold in dollars per troy ounce. Using calculators and box method multiplication, students converted the troy ounce value of gold to a dollar value. "The students were amazed to find that they were worth more than half a million dollars in gold, and many were even valued at more than one million dollars," said Mrs. McKillop.

To complete the lesson, students used their artistic skills to create gold coins that were added to the hallway displays of giant pots of gold for each class that participated, reminding them that their class is worth its weight in gold.