Function Carnival has students create height vs. time graphs representing the height of water in various different shaped containers. Work your way through it. It’s kind of fun.

Water line has students create height vs. time graphs representing the height of water in various different shaped containers. Work your way through it. It’s kind of fun.

Sam Shah created a set of cards of rational functions. Students attach them to their heads as shown on the box of the kid’s game, and ask questions of their group to try to determine what their function is. Fun.

Everything you need for this activity is on Sam’s blog.

I put together this Simplifying Radicals speed dating activity. It does include cube and fourth roots, which may be above the curriculum. It’s in Word format. Radical Speed Dating

Here’s the entire post.

I take no credit for this idea at all. I was in a classroom this morning, and the teacher had the students play a game of Radical SNAP. The students were totally engaged, and were enthusiastically converting between mixed and entire radicals. It’s pretty simple to set up.

Materials: You need one deck of cards with the 10, J, Q and K removed for each pair of students, and one giant square root symbol per pair of students. This one should do the trick: Giant Root

Pair off the students in your class. Each pair gets a deck of cards, and should remove the 10, J, Q and K. Shuffle the remaining cards, and deal them so that each person has half the deck, face down.

Mixed to Entire

The students flip over their top cards. The student on the left puts his in front of the radical, and the student on the right puts hers under the radical. The first student to correctly convert the mixed radical to an entire radical wins the round.

Entire to Mixed

The students flip over their top cards, and put them both under the radical. The first student to correctly simplify the radical or to identify that it can’t be simplified wins the round.

Here’s how it’ll work:  I have 7 stations set up around the room.  At each station, there will be the various algebraic steps in solving a completing-the-square problem cut apart and laminated and in random order.  Groups will rearrange the puzzle pieces in the correct order.

Everything you need to run this activity is at the link above.

This Word document has all that for the Systems unit. Mathematics 20-1 Systems of Equations and Inequalities

This Word document has all that for the Rational Expressions unit. Mathematics 20-1 Rational Expressions and Equations