Math Sprints or Worksheet Race...

One activity that I love doing with my class is what I call the Worksheet Race, others call them Math Sprints.

How do we do the activity you ask?

"For this activity, I print each page onto a different color of paper, simply for organizational purposes. I hand out page 1 and the kids work each problem. When they are done, they bring it up to me and I tell them which problems to continue working on. If they get all the problems on card 1, I give them card 2. The kids love this, mainly because they only have to focus on 5-6 problems at a time and get pretty much instant feedback."

Here is a link for one I just did involving, (Midpoint, Distance,Patterns(Inductive Reasoning),Conditional Statements).

Worksheet Race - Geometry

Atlanta = Snowed IN = CABIN FEVER 4 some..

The Metro Atlanta area has been out of school all week due to the snow/ice storm that hit us Sunday. My kids should be at home enjoying a nice winter break. Tomorrow makes Day 4 of not being able to go anywhere and the temperature is not expected above freezing until Friday. So this post has a lot to do with what I learned from teaching last week.

1) Inductive and Deductive reasoning can't be taught together. I already knew that, but teaching inductive reasoning last week reinforced it, because the students took the full period to realize that Inductive Reasoning is pattern based. Would love to hear better ways to teach it :)


2) Stop using book formulas if you can create something better. Kate Nowak did for Coordinate Geometry. She came up with her own formulas for slope, distance and midpoint. Her distance formula worked wonders for my students who struggled the most last semester. I can't wait to try her slope formula next year. The midpoint formula works fine as is to me.

Treasure Hunt Activity

I am big into activities that I think engage the students. One such activity is a treasure hunt Dan Meyer style the king of math blogs. Here is a link to his stations Treasure Hunt Meyer.

Basically it is a review activity.  You have anywhere from 8-16 stations. Even though, trust me 8 is usually enough they take anywhere from 30-50 minutes. Students in groups of 2-3 do multiple choice problems and depending on the answer they get it sends them to the next problem. If they get sent back to the same problem twice, they made a mistake and you ask them to give you the order in which they did each problem and tell them where they went wrong.

Here is one I did last semester on Factoring Polynomials and Radicals. Please download, use and tell me how you think I can make them better!

Treasure Hunt (Factoring Polynomials & Radicals)