There's no magic involved, only an understanding of rows, columns and order. The best part about this lesson is that there is plenty of room for creative story-telling. With a little math anyone can discover exactly how long that little white ball is actually over the plate. Its relatively easy to describe a light year in a single sentence, but it's quite another to gain an appreciation for the extreme distances involved. In this lesson there are several hypothetical situations where the calculations of speed and distances result in very interesting answers.
Students calculate their weight on the various planets.
A series of five 4x4 cards with seemingly printed with random numbers gives way to an astonishing magic trick. Students are delighted to learn the secret behind it all. It isn't mind-reading. It isn't memorization. I wish I knew who gathered this information together, but I don't.