Learning Activities | Sarah Cramer's eFolio

To introduce students to the idea of a balanced equation, this first activity used the metaphor of a seesaw and a scale to emphasize that both sides of an equation must always be equal. Over the span of three days, students worked to complete two packets of problems that involved translating word problems into balanced equations using pictures and variables, and then solving those equations. On the third day, several students who had finished early worked on an extension that got them thinking about the idea of working backwards to solve an equation.

In the next lesson, I moved my students another step closer to solving equations algebraically by introducing the idea of working backwards. Students figured out how to solve number puzzles by working backwards to find the original number in the sequence; they discovered that they needed to undo each operation by “reversing with the inverse.”

LAP 4
Timed Agenda LAP 4 Day 1
LAP 4 lesson reflection

*My original plan for this unit included four LAPs. However, after speaking with my students’ math teachers from last year, I realized that they had already used some of the activities I had planned to use for this unit. Consequently, I adapted my unit and did not end up teaching LAP 2 or LAP 3 to my students. This taught me the valuable lesson of communicating with other teachers before and during planning, rather than just after.