Looking for tips on how to keep the students engaged. Every year I teach this lesson I have such a variety of students who either get it right away and are bored and a group that doesn’t understand and immediately disengages. They simply do not have the attention span to listen to me explain these concepts even with a guided note taking sheet.
Anyone else struggling with this? Or has any tips to make this lesson go more smoothly?
It can be a struggle! Some things that have worked for me:
- Have kids at the front of the room holding the bags. Put them in charge of all manipulation.
- create a story out of the info in the bags. Get th to makeup the variables and treat the story as a sort of Madlib! This diverges a little from the slides, but a little tweaking and I think the could work, or if you have been doing this for a few years you may find that you have the beats without using all the slides and can supplement them with variable names of your own design for a story.
- differentiate the lesson. For the kid that get it… do they need to keep going? Can you do a warm up to gauge their understanding then keep a small group to work through the content while the others work on some practice problems by hand?
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