In every class a student usually brings up PEMDAS, and then we discuss what I don’t like about that acronym. I enjoy listening to their conversations as they talk, and it also gives me insight into where they are at in their understanding of order of operations as well as how they were taught this as 5th graders. I’ve started introducing order of operations by having the following up on my SMART board along with an example problem on the whiteboard and having students do a stand and talk to talk about which things need to be done before others. I color coded the cards, and I usually go over this with students before they start the activity so they don’t become overwhelmed when they start. Then for practice, I came up with this Desmos activity.

In almost every class, I will have a student who will use the distributive property in the math talk so we can talk about so-and-so’s method of multiplying and then I’ll later introduce the term distributive property. I read it too fast the first couple times and missed their mistake.įor a few days leading up to teaching students the distributive property we do math talks, and this has made teaching the distributive property go SO much better for me. I loved this one from one of my students. You can download the template from here blog post here. Then I used Sarah Carter’s Two truths and a Lie activity. I edited her version to not include the Distributive property, since we hadn’t covered that one yet. Then for practice, we use this Desmos activity from Cathy Yenca. What do I need to do?” Then, “Ok, now we’re multiplying. After we talk about that, I introduce this property by saying, “I’m a 5. Identity Property: Identity is who you are, so in the identity property the number wants to keep it’s identity. In the associative property we see numbers “associating” with different numbers.

For example, you may associate with certain people at basketball practice, and you associate with other people at church. She did a great job of helping students see the connection between what the word actually means and what is happening in the property.Ĭommutative Property: You see the word “commute” so the numbers “commute” or change places.Īssociative Property: You see the word “associate”. I co-taught with a teacher a couple years ago who was a huge help when it came to teaching properties. We start with the associative property, identity property, and commutative property. The high school teachers in my district also use it. In my opinion it’s more organized than the factor tree method, and I like that it can be applied to other concepts such as greatest common factor as well as with variables. I’ve started using this method because for a couple reasons. Since students typically have already learned how to do prime factorization using the factor tree method, I do a couple examples of that before introducing them a method similar to the birthday cake method I found on Sarah’s blog. Students will also usually bring up factors in our conversation. Which one doesn’t belong? works great as a warm-up a few days after going over prime and composite numbers to review this vocab. Some students really get into it and have a lot of fun with coming up with other ways to move to a different number. I pick a number and if that number is a factor of the number students are standing by they have to move to a different corner, but they are not allowed to walk. I put four numbers in the corners of my room. I also incorporate a brain break called Factor Hop into this part of the unit as well. (I incorporate prime/composite into brain breaks as well. Then we review prime and composite numbers before getting into prime factorization. (Then I give them time to think about what the answer is.) Do 2 to the 3rd power jumping jacks.” “Ok everyone stand up! 2 to the 3rd power. I also incorporate this throughout the unit in brain breaks. I typically spend about a day on this and use Kahoot for practice. We start the unit talking about exponents so that students can use exponents when we get to prime factorization and order of operations. I love order of operations, and I love introducing students to solving equations. Unit 2 in 6th grade is an introduction to algebra.

Desmos graph art cake