MFM2P - Day 48 (Factoring)

Today's warm up was this Estimation 180:

And here are their estimates:

There was only one student whose answer was clearly way off and he freely admitted that he just guessed without really looking at the question.

We consolidated yesterday's work, but staying on task was very challenging for some today (we went into a "secure school" first period today, which got extended so things were just "off"). We went over the first page together, emphasizing the need to make sense of the numbers.

Then we moved on to factoring. Out came the algebra tiles and we struggled through the first two pages of this handout. I teach factoring by asking them to create a rectangle (as close to a square, if there are multiple options) and read off the length and width to get the factors. I used my document camera to show what I am doing with the tiles. I was very pleased when one student asked to come up and show how to make a rectangle using the document camera.

This is what we got done today:

I left that class fairly certain that about half the class still has no idea how to factor so we will be working on that some more tomorrow. I will see if I can come up with a way of making this more engaging...