Experience First

Today’s activity will have students review ideas from lessons 7.1-7.2 in an around the world style activity. To prepare, print the problems on card stock, cut them up, and distribute them around the room. Make sure each student has a recording sheet.

Students are to travel “around the world” completing the problems in any order that they choose. We add the condition that students must do each problem with a different partner, thus increasing the richness and variety of the dialogue. They should write the work for problem A in box A and so on, so that their work is easier to check later on.

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Formalize Later

You may wish to spend time at the end of class going over the most difficult problems. For our students, problems J, K, and L proved to be the most challenging. Have multiple students share their strategies and approaches and encourage students to share things they tried that didn’t work, as well as those that did. One key skill we want students to gain in math class is figuring out what to do when they don’t know what to do. Can they relate it back to a similar, easier problem? Can they provide an estimate of the answer? Can they identify the key information from the problem stem?

At the end of an activity like this we like to have students reflect using the sentence stems:    

The station that was easiest for me was ___ because…

The station that was hardest for me was ____ because…

One thing I can do to prepare for tomorrow’s checkpoint is...