Factoring Activities
Looking for engaging factoring activities for your Algebra 1 or Algebra 2 students? Check out these creative and hands-on factoring games and puzzles that will help make factoring fun!
Activities to Motivate and Prepare Students for Factoring
Looking to introduce students to the concept of factoring quadratics? This collection of activities will help students discover patterns and gain fluency with factoring.
X Puzzles Factoring Review Game
I love using X Puzzles to introduce factoring trinomials. These puzzles are also known as sum and product puzzles since the goal of the puzzle is to find the two numbers that have a given sum and product.
ZERO Game to Introduce Factoring Quadratics
Created by Shaun Carter, the ZERO Game helps to motivate why it is important to be able to factor 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!
Looking for Patterns in Factoring Trinomials
I always have my Algebra 1 students look for patterns before we begin factoring polynomials. Check out a printable page I give them to glue in their interactive notebooks as a reference.
Activities for Practicing Factoring
Check out these hands-on activities to get students practice factoring polynomials! As an added bonus, many of these factoring quadratics activities are self-checking.
Factoring Trinomials Question Stack Activity
Question stacks are one of my favorite self-checking activities. This particular activity can be used both to practice multiplying binomials and factoring quadratics.
Factoring Trinomials with GCFs Question Stack Activity
This self-checking factoring question stack activity is similar to the one shared above, but this one requires students to sometimes factor out the GCF of the expression before factoring.
Factoring Quadratics Activity a=1
I used this factoring quadratics matching activity to help my students review factoring monic quadratics (when a = 1) before moving on to factoring non-monic quadratics.
Puzzles Involving Factoring
These creative puzzles require students to know how to factor quadratics in order to solve the puzzles. I love using puzzles like this in my classroom because students end up factoring way more polynomials than they think they will in the process of solving the puzzle.
Factoring Puzzle with Movable Tiles
In this Open Middle Style factoring puzzle, students are challenged to use the digits 0-9 to fill in the squares. Each digit can be used only once.
Shared Factors Puzzle
Can you fill in the missing blanks so that each side of the square shares a factor with each of its neighboring sides?
Quadratic Area Puzzles
Solving these quadratic area puzzles (inspired by Naoki Inaba) will require lots of factoring practice!
Factorable Polynomials Open Middle Style Puzzle
Mr. Canning created an open middle style puzzle which involves placing the numbers 1-9 in the missing blanks to create 9 factorable quadratics.
Factoring Polynomials Square Puzzle Activity
This factoring polynomials square puzzle shared by Public Schools of North Carolina in their Resources for Algebra Blackline Masters collection is a great way to give students lots of practice with factoring quadratics!
This type of puzzle is also known as a tarsia puzzle.
