4/26/07

This week I'm reviewing how to solve equations with my class. It's kind of funny, because when students first see equations, many of them think of the word 'algebra.' Some get scared, some get nervous, and some get excited. Well, this class is made up of the scared and nervous types.

We first looked at equations a week ago, because we needed to get them in before the state testing. I was a little nervous about going back to equations without spending a ton of time walking them through the steps again. But I was very pleasantly surprised!

I put up a simple problem like: 3x + 4 = 19 and asked for a volunteer to come to the board and solve the problem. It was so exciting to see almost every hand in the room shoot up! I chose Michael to come up first. He's really shining lately. This equation stuff makes sense to him, and he's become more confident in his math abilities. He got 100% on the last quiz and the last few entrance or exit slips. When he came to the board, I asked the rest of my class to decide what the first step is, and to check Michael's work as he did the problem. Michael easily solved this problem:

I was excited to see how easy this problem appeared to be for my students. They all excitedly agreed with what Michael did, and quickly asked for more problems. I began putting up harder problems, and my students hit a few roadblocks. The best part of that was that they were really problem solving with each other. I truly did not need to be part of the conversation. I occasionally asked a question to clarify or help their thinking, but they constructively helped each other through the problem solving. I was incredibly reassured about their abilities, since they did so well with this activity.

Today we're going to play a matching game with the symbolic or numeric representation of equations and expressions, and the written words that mean the same thing. I would love to think that this will be absolutely no problem for my class to complete, but for some reason I feel that there will be at least one or two students who find this totally confusing. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see. The idea for this matching game actually came from a workshop that my teammate Yvette attended. It was a workshop called SIOP, which focused on strategies that are helpful for instructing ELL or ESL students. I like this game because it isn't only 30 = 4x + 14 and then you having to find "thirty is equal to four x plus fourteen." There's also a step for how to solve the equation.

For one of the equations there is:

There are two equations included in this game (the second one more complicated than the first). In total there are 14 strips of paper. It would be easy to add more to the game as we progress, or as the students become ready for it. We're going to play this game multiple times. The first time I'm going to have students find the match from the numbers to the words. The second time students will need to find every one that is a part of their numerical equation. The third time they will need to put themselves in order according to how we solve their equation. The last time students will put themselves in order according to how we solve their equation, but using words. Each time I think I'll collect the construction paper slips and distribute them to different students. I'm really excited about this; I think they will LOVE this game.

Later this week I'm going to give a quiz on solving equations. It's only 10 questions long, but it will be a mixture of one, two, and multiple step equations. For this book I've been giving numerous mini-quizzes of 5 -10 questions. I find so far that, as my students take their larger assessments, they seem to do better after having that boost in between quizzes or checkups.

Following is my quiz. It won't be formatted like this, but this will show you what I'm expecting students to solve:

1. 9 + 12x = 81
2. 31 = 8g - 9
3. 2r + 5 = 21
4. 22(3+p) = 88
5. 56 = 8(s-6)
6. 40 = c + 2c - 101
7. 4x + x - 2x + 3 = 54
8. 2(n+3)/2 = 23
9. 134 = 7k - 10 + 5k
10. 3z + 22 -z = 162