Are your students food motivated? How long does it take them to notice if you have a bag of candy in the room? Mine can sniff it out like bears! Let’s capitalize on that motivation by using fun-sized bags to create and substitute into variable expressions. What’s in the bag? Any single-serving bag with aRead more
Why is factoring so important? Students enter our math classrooms with a wide range of skills. Many of those skills are essential for success in their current courses. Spending the time in your classroom to teach the essential skills can really pay off. It gives students a chance to show what they know or fillRead more
How to start substituting values into expressions Now that your students have been introduced to the terms variables, coefficients, and expressions it is time to start substituting values into the expressions. We can continue working with our picture tiles before going directly to calculations using symbolic representations to further develop their understanding of variables andRead more
How to introduce variable expressions to algebra students Are you ready to introduce variables to your class? Thinking about diving right into the textbook and starting students with the printed problems on the page? They are just letters and symbols that represent unknowns so this should be no problem, right?! For some students, yes, thatRead more
Why are integers so important to review? High school students often struggle with operations on integers. Since integer operations are essential for just about everything in middle and high school math, I do spend some time at the beginning of the semester explicitly teaching operations on integers. It is a review for many of myRead more
Most people would agree that money is an important topic to learn about. But who should be teaching teens financial literacy? Parents? Schools? What should be taught? And realistically, HOW does financial literacy fit in with the traditional high school curriculum? Who is equipped to teach financial literacy? In an ideal world, parents would teachRead more
Shouldn’t students already know how to take notes by the time they enter the high school math classroom? Isn’t providing students with guided notes giving them too much of a crutch to lean on? How do people even have time to make their own notes? These are questions that a lot of teachers consider whenRead more
Here is a great lesson/activity for using geometric sequences to model real world problems. Feel free to use/modify this lesson plan to meet the needs of your students. Lesson Objectives Define terms related to geometric sequences. Relate the terms in geometric sequences to real-world situations. Give an example of how the formula is derived. DetermineRead more
Here is a great activity to teach one variable equations using Excel (Google Sheets, etc.). This is a great activity for 9th and 10th graders completing Algebra 1/Integrated math, or for 8th graders working on one variable equations. Why Use Real-World Math Connections to Teach One Variable Equations? When working on topics such as howRead more
This is a great way to get your students into groups and assess their number sense, as well as their cooperation skills. Preparation: I whipped up these cards with different types of rational and irrational numbers. They are available for free when you click here, but you can easily make your own set if youRead more