Reviewing the Unit
Objective
Big Idea
Instruction & Teacher Modeling
In today's lesson, I will have my students engage in several activities to help them review for the upcoming unit assessment. To start off today's lesson, I will first providemys tudents with the rules as they pertain to working in stations. The rules are as follows:
- Stay focused on the task
- Stay involved in the activity
- Stay in your group
- Stay diligent (don't give up... Work until time is called).
- Do your very best
- Use your inside voices
- ALL group members MUST participate
Next, I will separate my students into groups based upon ability. The reason I want to troup them based upon ability is to force more participation from all students. Grouping the students this way will keep students who are struggling from relying too heavily on those students who have been progressing well throughout the unit.
Normally, when my students work together, I create groups of mixed ability to provide opportunities for struggling students to learn from those student who show promise of mastery. But, this particular lesson is taking place right before a unit quiz that will provide information as to what each student needs in order to succeed. After that quiz, they will then be put into flexible groups to address only those areas in which they are in need of help. Because of this, I need to see what students have learned and how far they can take what they have learned. Thus the reason for the homogeneous groups. This forces struggling students to persevere in the solving of problems without have the "crutch" of an expert in their group. But, they still have each other to rely on and bounce ideas off of.
Independent Exploration
Today, my students will participate in station activities which are as follows:
Station 1:
Matching Equivalent Expressions - At this station, the students will have a set of algebraic equivalent expressions that they will have to match up. They will also have to create algebraic expressions that are equivalent to given algebraic expression. And lastly, they will have to create their own set of three equivalent algebraic expressions.
Station 2:
The Exponents Task - At this station, my students will evaluate an expression. They will do this by rolling two dice a red one and a green one. The red die will represent the variable a and the green die will represent the variable b. Once they have the values for both a and b then they can evaluate the algebraic expression.
Station 3:
Matching Area Models to Their Expression - At this station, the students will be given a set of area models as well as a set of algebraic expressions. The students will have to match the algebraic expressions to their matching model. It is possible for one area model to have more than one algebraic expression that matches it.
The resource for this station comes from http://map.mathshell.org. The resource in and of itself is an excellent lesson from beginning to end (you may want to take a look). However, for the purpose of this station, I am only concerned with pages 10 through 19. These are the pages that contain the cards for the area models and their matching expressions.
Station 4:
What have you learned? - At this station students will be provided with 10 minutes to write a brief essay of at least three paragraphs describing what they have learned during this unit.
Closing
To close out this lesson, we will use 10 minutes to discuss the stations and what knowledge was revisited and/or gained while completing each task. During the last 10 minutes of class will complete a ticket out the door. The ticket out the door is as follows:
TOTD:
Answer the following questions in complete sentences:
- Do you now feel more confident about your knowledge as it pertains to math expressions? Why or Why Not?
- Did today's activities help you to uncover the areas that you need to focus on when studying? In what way?