Next on Making Algebra Meaningful – Dora to the Rescue!
Our goal is to tackle this beast from our expectations:
add and subtract polynomials involving the same variable up to degree three [e.g., (2x + 1) + (x^2 – 3x + 4)],using a variety of tools
and
multiply a polynomial by a monomial involving the same variable to give results up to degree three [e.g., (2x)(3x), 2x(x + 3)], using a variety of tools
My first thought when creating my lessons is how can I get students curious! Sometimes curiosity will come out from Act 1 of a 3 Act math task. Or sometimes it’s from a puzzelly type open activity that makes students struggle.
Here is MY new struggle:
How can I make students curious when teaching collecting like terms, and eventually the distributive property?
Last year’s opener to teach collecting like terms:
And that’s it! Every time I do this kids are confused and ask “Why didn’t we just have the value of x to begin with?”
I want a task that makes us curious and need to use like terms to simplify an expression.
Task 1: Order Up
Task 2: Dora to the Rescue
Here was how our conversation in math class (MFM1P) went…..How many pieces make up this Star wars Lego ship? 
We started with that picture and had a great conversation around Lego.
Then I showed this one.
Does the pool/hot tub have more pieces/less pieces/ or the same? This turned into “boy” Lego vs. “girl” Lego. My personal opinion is its all great…. My 3 daughters are just as excited to play with Yoda as they are with Disney princesses. Girls in the class agreed that they didn’t need their own line of lego!!!
I moved our conversation a little forward with asking Which costs more? And which should cost more?
Answers: Continue reading
I was checking out twitter last week and ran into this from Dan Meyer:
You’re about to plan a lesson on concept [x] and you’d like students to find it interesting. What questions do you ask yourself as you plan?
and I had a concept coming up that I have always had a tough reaction to. I threw it out there.
@ddmeyer @samjshah help! What’s the sell on part c? pic.twitter.com/hPmRzYRCts
— Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) February 20, 2015
To get students to be interested in it I wanted them to be “dying” to figure it out.
I thought about putting them in a place where they had to struggle— I wanted to open up the middle!
Michael Fenton has a series of Match my Parabola challenges and I thought of those. I modified his challenges a bit to include those examples from my tweet.
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