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Friday, January 20, 2012

Adding Like Monomials

I just spent the last three hours working on one algebra 1 lesson plan even though I have about 20 lesson plans I'm supposed to write this weekend.  Maybe not the most efficient use of my time, but I'm kind of excited about this one.  The topic is: adding like monomials.  Students understand pretty readily that they can't add expressions without variables to expressions with variables and they can't add two things that have different variables, but I've found they have a lot of trouble with understanding that they can't add an x expression to an x squared expression.  They won't take my word for it and it takes a lot of work to stop them from writing 2x+4x^2 as 6x or 6x^2.  Thinking about this, I threw together the following story worksheet/activity to see if it may help clarify the difference between an x and an x^2.  Any feed back would be awesome. Adding Like Monomials
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 20, 2012 at 8:02 PM

    I'm quite impressed with your 3-d graphics and corresponding 3-d man.

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  2. Lizzy-SenseiJanuary 21, 2012 at 8:52 AM

    Thank you! Although, I think it's a little eye wrenching. It kind of pops forwards and backwards. I could maybe fix that by having the man behind the lines of the cube instead of in front. I didn't want to obsess so tried not to fiddle too much.

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