15 Fun Factoring Activities for Algebra

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!

Factoring Activities

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

magnifying glass with hat on with text around it: looking for patterns 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

photograph of parabola with text "factoring quadratics question stack"

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

photograph of binder open to page of notebook paper with text "factoring trinomials with gcfs question stack"

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.