Solving Equations – Infinitely Teaching

Choose Your Own Adventure Project with Google Forms

September 20, 2015April 22, 2020 Mandi

You know when you find a project and you think, “This could be a fun project that my students could benefit from”, and then you get the results from your students and it was a flop? Well this isn’t that type of project. I was blown away by some of the stories my students created. I don’t have all of them listed below because they have to correct their mistakes before I will publish them, but they can keep correcting until it’s ready for the public eye. Check back, I’ll add more as they become available.

I can’t take all the credit for this project. The original idea came from @jmattmiller in his book Ditch That Textbook. I did make the scoring guide and the planning sheet to help students create this. Matt also has a video on his site that would be a good resource also.

Now Matt teaches Spanish and I teach Math, but the basic idea of Choose Your Own Adventure is present and could be adapted for any content area. My students had to have 5 equations, a good story line, images, & explanations of misconceptions if a player choose the wrong answer. We started by writing the story on the planning pages. It’s a lot easer to type this into Google Forms if you already have your story and equations in place on the planning page. I also included instructions about how to enter the information into forms on the back of the planning pages.

My scoring guide is based on our SBL. Our non-math standards include Quality of Work, Completeness of Work and Timeliness, basic skills an employer would want. We also assess based on our Math standards from our curriculum. You may take my scoring guide and adjust it to fit your curriculum.

I have the Docs set up to make a copy when you click on them.

Planning Page

Scoring Guide

Now for some awesomeness. (Disclaimer – some didn’t follow copyright and snagged images from Google. We did talk about this but some chose the easier path)

Journey to Be A Mage (all images drawn by student)

Treasure Map (in the Spirit of TLAP – @burgessdave would love this one)

interactive notebooking, Solving Equations

Solving Equations Part Two

September 3, 2014 Mandi

We split solving equations into two days. Our curriculum has solving equations as review, but our new standard adds the explain element to problem solving. I think it’s a good place to start the year. I used the rest of the foldable from Everybody is a Genius, and added a few other ideas found around the web (I can’t find the source now). I am also making files for my iPad so I can put the notes on my website for students who were absent or missed something during the process. I like how this is working out also!

The students are getting the process figured out and we aren’t taking as long getting items glued into the notebook. We also used our data tracking sheet for the first time this week. I’m excited to have the students enter their second assessment so they can see how much they have improved.

I have shared the link to my foldables (again, adapted from things I’ve seen on the web) and my pdf iPad files. Two of them are Word files but you can download the fonts for free. Just click in the font box to see what you need and head to the web for a search.

iPad Notes PDF

Distributive Property Foldable Word

Like Terms Word

interactive notebooking

Interactive Notebooking – the beginning

August 24, 2014 Mandi

With our first week of school complete, I now have a good idea about how INB is going to work in my classroom. For the most part my students like it. It is taking a little longer than I planned and with early dismissals for heat, I’m a little behind. We spent the second day of class setting up the notebook and then began taking notes. I am precutting all of the material right now, hoping to save some time. Some students still don’t have their supplies, so I am providing glue sticks and notebooks. I hope most of them eventually get supplies because it could get a little expensive for me if they don’t.

On page one, we used the information sheet the students filled out the first day and the second page is the student success page with important information from the class. Page 3 has the Unit 1 Table of Contents and we have our data tracking page behind that. I’m putting the tab (half of a mini post-it) for Unit 1 on this page because we will need to return to data tracking and table of contents frequently.

First Day Activity

Standards Graph

This is my first page of notes in the INB. We are putting the standard at the top of the page. I used the Frayer Model for the vocab word equation. The Inverse Operations page is from Math=Love (thanks for sharing!)

The next page is from Everybody is a Genius (also thanks for sharing!) and we glued the side down so they would fold out. I also have a special case foldable that is on an example page.

I still feel like I’m finding my way, but I like what we’ve done so far. I hope I can get the time factor figured out so I don’t get too far behind in my curriculum. I haven’t been able to use the activities I’ve planned either (due to time) so I hope I can figure that out too.