A while back I saw a post online that someone did a review where after each problem, they received a cup to stack. So simple and sooooooo engaging... so I thought! Not so simple really. It was fast. It was furious. It was rigorous.
Of course we couldn't just stack cups right? We needed a theme! The student above, Anosha and I came up with Build Me A Castle! We ordered tiaras and even dressed princess themed the first day. I didn't get a picture because we were going crazy. This is not a review for the weak.
First, I laminated and used a bunch of task cards I had. I even made one for standard to slope-intercept form. Most of mine came from Algebra Accents on Teachers Pay Teachers. I purchased her whole curriculum several years ago and it has been one of my best investments ever! The ones I used will be listed below if you are interested.
Really, any matching game can be used. I'll include my slope matching game that you could just use the graphs for.
To say the students loved it would be an understatement. They did not stop. We did it for 2 solid days and they answered non-stop. I threw out easy and hard. Order of ops to exponential functions. It was a great spiral for the semester exam as I did it just before the end of the year.
I gave each student a wipe board to show
their answer on. Each day I had about 5 task card stacks. Each group got one
from each stack to start regardless of how many group members they had. It is
easiest for you if each card stack is a different color. As each student
solved, they came up to the teacher to check answers. If correct, they took a
cup and a different problem. If wrong, you could have them correct of offer
instruction.
I was surprised that as fast as it was moving, we were able to differentiate pretty good and make sure students were doing a variety of problems. At the end of the day, we took a cup count and let them start with that the next day. Another option is castle height or design.
The above were our winning group with 120 cups. I had them compete within the class then across my classes. Either way, they loved it and every group was able to spiral review.
It was a great activity I will use several times each year. I think my favorite thing was a way to use all those task cards again!!! I needed about 300 cups as an FYI.
Get a couple of my task cards for FREE here. I will add any other task cards I create in the same folder so you can check back throughout the school year. The ones I included right now are:
Slope Matching Activity with these graph cards:
Standard to Slope-Intercept Form
The Algebra Accents ones I used and were worth every penny (I think most are $3) were:
Enjoy!
Lisa
3 comments:
Oh my gosh, what an awesome and fun idea! I really like your adice to color-code the topics for easy monitoring. I'm thinking Dollar Tree would be a great place to get lots of cups. A couple of questions: did groups within a class build their own, or the whole class build one? How did you preserve the "castle" from other classes? Awesome share!!
Thank you!
I let each group build their castles with a few minutes at the end of class and took pictures and a count for each group each class. I did it over 2 days and just handed out the counted cups for each group on day 2.
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