What’s tougher than a tough math concept? Teaching it in a way your students can grasp and understand. With resources that make everything from prime factorization to proof writing make sense, these TpT Teacher-Authors have got you covered!
Division
“Many students struggle with division,” says The Brighter Rewriter. “Knowing divisibility rules is a big help. I wrote cadence chants for dividing by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10. These chants are like the military’s Sound Off cadence. Students are crazy about these chants, which means they learn them quickly and can recall and apply them correctly when working on division problems! This bundle includes chants, posters, task cards, reminder cards, and bookmarks for the divisibility rules.”
Prime Factorization
Wild About Words says, “This one evolved over a few years and all came together last year! I finally planned a scaffolded and organized set of lessons that enabled me teach prime factorization in five days with the majority of the kids successfully mastering it. First we played a game to ‘fix up’ previous misconceptions about factors and multiples and then spent the next three days developing strategies for organizing the factors, naming our strategies, and playing a really cool game called X Factors. The last day was a cooperative review and assessment. The kids LOVED it, and I now have a forever set of really fun and successful lessons for what I’ve found to be one of the math concepts that can often cause confusion!
The Reasoning Behind Graphing Linear Functions
Courage to Core says, “It can often be easy for students to quickly learn to graph a given linear function. Yet, I used to struggle to get students to concurrently understand that they’re graphing a function which represents a set of inputs and corresponding outputs AND that the graph shows us a dynamic picture of what happens to outputs as inputs increase. In order to guide students to spend more time with the function concept, I created a series of ‘missions’ that challenge students to explore functions through models of genies who transform candies, racing cars, gym memberships, and wingsuit fliers. In this way, students are able to not only understand a line as a geometric object with certain parameters, but also as a great visualization of change in action. In short, a function. Here’s the first resource: Linear Functions (LF1).
Proof Writing
“One of the trickiest units for students (and teachers!) in high school Geometry is proof writing,” explains Math Giraffe. “Usually, the kids just haven’t seen anything like it. Proofs take a whole new type of thinking. The best change I ever made was adding a unique type of Algebra proof before the first Geometry proofs. Most textbooks do basic Algebra proofs with solving an equation, but I noticed that once I developed a new set where students use substitution and the transitive property, they were able to ease into the concept of combining two previous lines to rewrite a new line of the proof. This made all the difference. It completely eliminated the stress for the students! This proof unit uses this approach to help teachers introduce proofs much more smoothly.”
Rational and Irrational Numbers
Education with DocRunning says, “Although students should have mastered this in middle school, so many of my students come to me still not understanding the difference between irrational and rational number concepts. I use these three kinesthetic activities to work on the concept and then follow up with practice and other fun activities. This post on my blog explains more about how I use these activities.”
