Idea Galaxy

Adventures in Junior High and Mathematics

Search Results for: fractions

12 Activities to Make Unit Rate Stick

by

Unit rates show up everywhere. What an awesome topic to teach kids- they’ll definitely have lots of opportunities to use it in their “real” life. Unit rate is so applicable which also makes it something students may understand a little bit more easily. When you look around the internet for ideas for teaching unit rate, you’ll see a lot of grocery store examples. These examples will get you a good start, but there’s no reason to stay stuck in the grocery store.

Unit rate shows up in so many different fields. In this post, I’ll share with you some of my favorite unit rate activities that will get students understanding, and even looking out for, unit rates. [Read more…] about 12 Activities to Make Unit Rate Stick

Activities to Make Practicing Multi-Step Equations Awesome

by

My history with teaching multi-step equations hasn’t been a pretty one, but spoiler alert, there’s a happy ending. A few years ago I was co-teaching with a relatively new teacher and I felt a lot of pressure to show him the ropes. I was new to the 8th grade math standards. Everything was going well for the first month of school until we got to solving multi-step equations. We worked for two full weeks and taught students just how multi-step equations had been taught to us. The kids bombed the unit test. It was devastating. Then, we had a chance to reteach the majority of the kids and we tried something else. It also failed. It was a humbling experience to say the least. [Read more…] about Activities to Make Practicing Multi-Step Equations Awesome

Teaching Absolute Value Through Discovery

by

In recent years, mean absolute deviation and variability concepts have been added to 7th grade math. It seems like a huge jump from their current understanding to these concepts, but we as teachers always figure out ways to make the content accessible to students. The first time I taught mean absolute deviation I just told the kids that absolute value was the distance a number is from zero. It seems like a simple concept and in my rush to get to the meat of the topic, I left it at that. Well, needless to say, the majority of my students don’t retain information just because I say it a couple of times. I know, I know, teaching lesson learned (again!). Let me share with you how teaching absolute value through discovery made teaching the whole topic of mean absolute deviation and absolute value in general so much easier.

[Read more…] about Teaching Absolute Value Through Discovery

12 Engaging Activities for Mean Absolute Deviation

by

I’ll be the first to admit that when the concept of mean absolute deviation was added to our standards, I didn’t know what it was. Of course, I’ve worked with standard deviation and mean, but I was a newbie to this concept of MAD. As I’ve wrapped my head around it, I’ve learned it enhances other concepts students are learning, and it’s taught as part of helping students to understand variability. In this post I’m sharing with you 12 engaging activities for teaching mean absolute deviation (MAD) to help your  students really get it.

[Read more…] about 12 Engaging Activities for Mean Absolute Deviation