Logarithms Foldable

Today I’m sharing a logarithms foldable I created for my students to glue in their algebra interactive notebooks. I also share a helpful log loop trick.

Missing three days of school due to the snow and ice really threw off my plans for Algebra 2.  I had hoped to get through logarithms before Christmas Break.  That didn’t happen.  We did get started with logarithms.  But, I had to spend the first four days of the new semester finishing up our logarithm unit.

My students initially HATED logarithms.  This surprised me because my Algebra 2 students LOVED them last year.  This might have had something to do with the fact that I chose to introduce them on a day that most students thought we should have been out of school.  Many of the schools around us had already closed due to the impending arrival of Cleon.  But, we were in school.  And, my students wanted to have nothing to do with learning something new.

This introduction to logarithms is basically a compilation of a lot of ideas I found on the Internet.  The Loop Trick was stolen from Amy Gruen at Square Root of Negative One Teach Math.  Another memory device was stolen from Zook Tutoring.  Additionally, I stole Until Next Stop’s Secret Method of teaching logarithms.

I made a booklet foldable for my students to introduce logarithms.  I wanted to emphasize both converting between exponential and logarithmic form and evaluating basic logarithms.

The inside of the foldable houses lots of practice problems that were stolen from a Kuta worksheet.

After we came back from five days off due to snow, I decided that my students needed a LOT more practice with converting logarithms to exponential form and vice versa.

I had been trying really hard to not teach them the loop trick.  I had been emphasizing the question: what exponent is required to go from a base of b to reach a value of a?  But, my students were frustrated, and I was frustrated.  Once I showed them the loop trick, it was like a whole new world.  You mean, that’s all we have to do?  Students were in disbelief over just how easy logarithms were.

Our notes were followed with lots and lots and lots of practice. We did logarithm speed dating. We played log war. We also played logarithm bingo.

One of my students took a deconstructed approach to their notes. I love that my students take such ownership in their interactive notebooks.