Integer Word Problem Practice with My Twist

I have been procrastinating by digging through my folder on my desktop labeled, "7th Grade Math".  Clever, huh?  I came across some integer problems in there that had a lot of promise as in-class practice.  It was a freebie that I had downloaded awhile back and it took a little research to find the author.  Anyway, I found that it came from Lisa at Teacher's Notebook.  I really liked the problems that were on the worksheet, but I was bummed that it was a worksheet.  There had to be a way to rework it, so that it would be more intriguing to my middle school kiddos.

photo credit: www.ew.com

I started thinking about the old game show from the 80s, "Classic Concentration".  If you haven't seen the show, contestants make matches on the game board to win prizes and slowly uncover a puzzle.  The person who solved it got a bigger prize. (See sample to the left)

Since the worksheets eventually lead students to do a coloring sheet, I thought that maybe I could use the idea of uncovering a puzzle. 

The first thing that I did was take the answer sheet and resize it to be 20 cm by 25 cm.  I then printed it out and glued it to a piece of card stock.

Next, I made a 5 x 4 grid.  Then I wrote the 12 correct answers in the boxes and 8 incorrect answers.  All of the solutions and incorrect solutions came from the answer key.

Then I cut it apart into 25 separate squares. 
                                                              

So this is the starting point of the activity.  I have the template for the answer sheet that students fill in at the end of this post.  The basic idea is that students would start like the above picture.  As they solve a problem, they will look at the board and then flip over the piece with their answer.  If they don't see their answer, they will need to check their work for errors.

As students continue to solve problems and flip over pieces, they will start to see the pieces of the answer sheet in the incorrect order.

Students will also realize that there are 8 unused answers.  Students will be asked to write a question/problem that has the unused answers as an answer.  

After the questions/problems are written, all of the pieces can be flipped over.  Students then have the job of getting the pieces into the correct order and making the picture.

The students' pictures will look like this when they are finished!

OK, so it's not exactly "Classic Concentration".  While making this activity though, I did have a few thoughts about how to make another activity that would resemble the actual game more.  I'm working on that one!





Here is the answer template that the students will be completing during the activity.  Before the activity, I would type in the questions from Lisa's worksheet or I am thinking to change "Problem" to be "Important information to solve the problem".  Then, I could just pass out the questions or put them on index cards.  

Out With The Old...

Well, I finally decided that I am going to remove the problem solving category from my grade book.  That isn't as horrifying as it sounds.  For many, many years, I have been giving students problems that would stretch them and get them to think a bit more creatively.  This was to be done independently of class time.  Some years, it has worked brilliantly and other years it hasn't been as successful.  I just feel like this has run it's course and is time to try something new.

As my classroom transitions next year to a blended and then flipped classroom, I am realizing that I will need to differentiate much more than I am currently doing.  I also need established tasks for independent work time or for fast finishers.   What I have done in the past just won't cut it for next year.  I have also been reading a lot about standards based grading and I am realizing that I have a great opportunity to replace something that needs to be gone with something that can tell me more about my students understanding.

The one hurdle I kept running into was the book.  Saxon isn't totally designed for how my train of thought was going.  As I was flipping through the teacher pages, that I've never really read, I found a list of lesson by topic.  As I examined the list, I decided to go rogue and not follow Saxon lesson by lesson.  I know it isn't recommended, and yes, I may regret this, but it is worth a shot right now.  So I am offering my apologies to all of the Saxon Algebra I users who are yelling at me as they read this.

The beauty of freeing myself from following lesson by lesson was that I was able to create.  I started looking through an old Transition Math and CPM Foundations of Algebra, Year I textbook that I had and found some inspiration.  I put some twists on a few of the ideas to match the standards I was teaching.  Once the creative juices were flowing, I was getting more and more excited about what was appearing on the paper before me.

Here is what I created.  I am excited to use these in place of the problem solving I have been doing.  I am hoping for a richer experience for my students and myself!

When the Schedule Gets Crazy...

This year, I was introduced to a website called Collaborative Mathematics through the math teacher's circle that I participate in once a month.  It is a site that puts out a video explaining a really interesting math problems and asks people to solve them and send in videos of how they solved the problem.  The challenges are put out once a month by the author Jason Ermer.  Jason is a Math and Computer Science teacher in Oslo, Norway.

I really liked the problems and started playing the videos and doing the challenges in class with my students right before a break or when the schedule was crazy.  The kids got into them and the discussion was great!  I also like it because there isn't a quick answer and it really forces the students to listen to each other and challenge each others' thinking.

The one thing that I have learned after doing a few of the challenges is that my struggling kiddos need some help focusing their thinking or else they will give up.  For the last challenge that we tried before spring break, I made the worksheet below and it really seemed to help my struggling students get into the problem and feel on par with those who were getting it faster.  I'm including it if you would like to try Challenge #3 with your students and use the worksheet.  This challenge is really good for writing rules for arithmetic sequences and pushing it farther into what happens when there is an alternating sequence and how do you write it.  But, by far, that isn't the only way to solve this problem! :)