I'm a fan of self-checking activities. These activities give students immediate feedback on how they're doing. A well designed self-checking activity puts wrong answers to work. Like a game of Mastermind, each incorrect answer should give students some feedback on their attempt and prompt them to keep working towards the correct solution. One type of self-checking activity is a "secret message" activity. You've probably seen this type of activity where students complete questions to assign letters to their answers and then these letters can be used to decipher a message. Often these messages are groan-worthy puns or jokes. My first year of teaching, I was bequeathed a well worn copy of Algebra with Pizzazz!, an entire book of just this type of secret message activity. My issue with these activities is that students immediately try to decode the message without completing the math questions. The goal for these students was to determine the message instead of practicing the math (although they did improve their cryptogram skills). The point of the message is for student to use this to check their work. If the message is garbled, they know they've made a mistake and need to go fix it. The FixThere is a relatively simple solution to this... just cut the message off the page. Give students the top part of the page with the question on it first. Once they've completed the question, hand them the bottom part of the page with the message on it to check their work. Additionally, instead of just a joke, I like the message to be some sort of instruction for students to do. On the activity below, the instruction is for the student to draw a silly picture in a box at the bottom of the page (in this case, "draw a picture of a crab at a birthday party"). This gives students a creative task while other students are finishing the work. Here is a link to the activity shown below. Once I build the template, this activity didn't take long to create. I used ChatGPT to create the questions. Just stated, "Create the first 10 terms of twenty-six different arithmetic sequences." I also asked next, "Now write the equation for each of these sequences." Then I cut and paste the first four terms into the first page and the tenth term into my answer key... easy peasy. Do you have a favorite secret message activity? How do you facilitate these activities in your classroom to get the most out of them? EL
Comments are closed.
|
Categories
All
|