Show What You Know about Expressions, Equations, & Inequalities

See my Do Now in my Strategy folder that explains my beginning of class routines.

Often, I create do nows that have problems that connect to the task that students will be working on that day.  Today I want students to think about how expressions, equations, and inequalities are related as well as how they are different from one another.  I want students to understand that an expression can model a situation using numbers, variables, and operations.  An equation also has these elements, but the expressions are equal to each other.  We can solve equations by using substitution or working backwards. We can use tables and graphs to also model equations. An inequality describes a relationship between two expressions that are not equal.   We can use substitution to test whether a value is a solution to an inequality.

Note:

• Before this lesson I check the tickets to go from Working with Inequalities.  I put a check if the answer is correct and an x if it is incorrect.  I do not write in the correct answers.

I pass back the tickets to go from the previous lesson, Working with Inequalities.  I tell students to work look over their work and correct any mistakes.  If they are stuck they can look at their notes or ask a student. 

As students work, I walk around and monitor student progress.  With a few minutes left, I ask students to show and explain their work under the document camera.  I have a few students who used different strategies come up and show and explain their work under the document camera.  I ask the class for questions and comments on the student work.  Students are engaging in MP3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

For this quiz I used a couple of different resources.  My school has a membership for www.testwiz.net.  This website has a very extensive item bank of Common Core questions.  I search by standard and make modifications as necessary.  Also, my school has subscription for the assessment bank for the College Preparatory Mathematics curriculum.  The bank has a wide variety of rigorous multiple choice and open-response questions.  See www.cpm.org for more details. 

I give students the Quiz.  Students engage with MP1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, MP2: Reason abstractly and quantitatively, MP4: Model with Mathematics, and MP6: Attend to precision.  If students do not finish in the allotted time, they set up a time (preferably that day) to come in and complete it.  I use this data to inform my instruction.   If students struggle with a concept, I will spiral it into do nows and homework assignments.  I may also add a few problems on that topic to the next quiz.