A few weeks ago, I had my best lesson of the year so far in pre-calculus as we were studying the 12 basic functions. My students were engaged like never before, and they became super competitive throughout the activity. They did way more questions than I ever would have been able to get them to …
Miscellaneous Activities
I used Shaun Carter’s ZERO! Game with great success to motivate factored form of quadratics. I presented this as a “game day” after we had talked about vertex form of quadratics and standard form of quadratics and BEFORE we started factoring quadratics the next day. It was PERFECT for an Early Release Friday with shortened, …
I love this graphing linear equations activity that uses transparencies. Students are given a coordinate plane template and a small strip of transparency paper with a straight line printed or drawn on it. Students have to use the transparent line to graph each of the following linear functions. For each function, they must then record …
It’s quite a bit past Easter now, but you could still use this multiplying polynomials egg hunt activity if you don’t care about being relevant to a current holiday. 🙂 A few years ago, I picked up a bag of Easter eggs at a garage sale. I didn’t know exactly what I planned on using …
Last month, I shared a building polynomials activity that I created. Since then, numerous teachers have shared photos with me of their students completing the puzzle. This makes me super happy! Since that activity has proved to be so popular, I thought it was time to share another activity I created to go along with …
The idea for this building and naming polynomials activity started out like many of my ideas do. I start thinking about the topic I’m teaching, and I ask myself “What if…?” This week, the topic was polynomials, and the question I asked myself was “What if I could create some sort of puzzle for polynomials?” …
We had some fun playing the Fraction Capture Game in Math Concepts. We haven’t reviewed improper fractions yet, so we’ll get another chance to play with an increased level of strategy after that.
Earlier this week, I challenged my chemistry students to a Black Box Activity Challenge. The idea is that they would be given containers where they could not see the contents. They would have to use their resources to create a hypothesis regarding what was in the container. My goal was to give my students a …
This Evaluating Functions Spider Puzzle was the perfect practice activity for my Algebra 1 students. These spider puzzles are the creation of Andy Lutwyche, and they are a free download on TES. Andy has created spider puzzles for many other topics as well that are well worth checking out! I use these spider puzzles inside …
I am a huge fan of these dimensional analysis shape cards that were created by Kathryn Freed to introduce students to the concept of converting units. I have used them with both my physical science students and my chemistry students. To use them, I give students a starting shape and an ending shape. They have …