Experience First

Today students will review the main ideas of unit 6 in an engaging, fast-paced, collaborative activity.

 

To set-up the game, you will need to print several copies of the activity page (corresponding to the number of groups you have) and cut up the questions and sort them into piles. Have students in groups of 3-4. Arrange the piles at a central location at the front of the room where you will be sitting such as your desk or a table. You will also need two waste baskets one closer and one further away, and some way to mark where students will stand (we use a yardstick).

 

Each team will send up one group member and grab a problem from your desk. The order that they take the problems does not matter, and groups do not have to solve them in the same order. The lettering on the questions allows groups to keep track of which ones they already solved. The student will bring the paper back to their group and they will solve it together. When they are done they return the paper to you and you tell them either “Yes” or “No” depending on if they got the problem correct or not. Do not give further clues on where they made a mistake if you gave them a ‘No’, simply send them back to their group to try again.  If the student got a ‘Yes’, they get to line up, crumple up their piece of paper and try to make a basket. If they make it into the closer basket they get 3 points for their team. If they make it into the further basket, they get 5 points for their team. If they miss both baskets, they can still get 1 pt for getting the question correct. We have students keep track of points on the front whiteboard. The student then sits down and sends a different group member to grab the next problem. We insist that groups rotate who they send up to pick up the problem and attempt the shot.

 

At the end of the time period, whichever team has the most points wins.

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Formalize Later

Questions in this activity range in difficulty. We continue to have students work on identifying parameters in systems of equations as well as generating their own systems. We like to use review days to have students attempt more open-ended problems that may be more difficult to put on an assessment simply because of the logistics of grading them. We also provide students opportunities to explore systems in multiple representations. Continue to provide graphical and tabular representations of functions instead of just giving the equation. You may wish to make all the questions available later for students who want to use them to review. Setting aside 10 minutes at the end of class to go over more challenging questions is a good idea.

 

In question I about Tommy’s Car Wash most students were unsuccessful at translating the phrase “there are three times as many “Quality” washes as “The Works” washes” into an equation and simply wrote 3q=w. This was a great opportunity to talk about making sense of problems (Math Practice 1!)

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