Cutting Together With Pasting To Combine Similar Terms

This year, I decided to truly emphasize combining similar price amongst my Algebra 1 students.  In retrospect, I should convey done the same thing inwards Algebra 2 because they were yet struggling amongst what they tin dismiss together with cannot combine.

I idea this would move a 1 twenty-four lx minutes catamenia lesson, but it ended upwards taking my students 2 days to operate through it.  There were lots of corking conversations happening, together with thus I mean value it was definitely worth it!  

I gave students a quarter canvass of newspaper that had a Federal Reserve annotation box together with iii polynomial expressions.

We began yesteryear taking about notes over what similar price are.  I truly wanted to emphasize to my students that xy together with yx are similar terms, together with thus I truly pushed the "order doesn't matter" this year.

I had them re-create downwardly the offset polynomial strip inwards their interactive notebooks.

Then, the students had to cutting the strip into terms.  This led to a corking tidings of what a term is.  Students had to brand certain they cutting the strip together with thus that each term contained the sign inwards front end of it.  Students were super careful to brand certain they were cutting the strips correctly which is just what I was hoping for.

Next, I instructed students to grouping the price into groups that were similar terms.  This is where the best conversations happened.  After students sorted their terms, I asked them how many groups they had.  When students realized they had sorted into a dissimilar let out of groups, they started justifying their groupings to their classmates.  It was only awesome to run across them pointing each other dorsum to the Definition of similar terms.  Finally, nosotros decided on how the price should move grouped.  

Next, I instructed students to gum inwards their groupings.  I intentionally did non say them how to grouping them in.  Luckily, the students glued them inwards dissimilar orders which allow us hash out the fact the lodge of the price doesn't matter.  

Finally, nosotros circled the groups together with combined the coefficients.  Since the students glued the groups inwards in dissimilar orders, their price ended upwards inwards dissimilar orders.  I emphasized that this was okay equally long equally the sign inwards front end of 21x was negative, the sign inwards front end of 2x^2 was negative, together with the sign inwards front end of 4 was positive.  

Next, they proceeded to create the side yesteryear side 2 problems inwards their groups.

The nil coefficients together with invisible 1 coefficients freaked about of my students out, but they persevered.

Last problem:

We finished the aeroplane catamenia off amongst 2 additional exercise problems.  The kids were quite miffed that I did non plough over them strips to cutting because how else would they figure out what the price were.  To remedy this, many students drew "cut lines" betwixt the price to split upwards them.

I similar this action got students truly separating terms, grouping them, together with combining them.  I promise I made an abstract concept a picayune to a greater extent than concrete together with understandable for my students.

File for this lesson constitute here (PDF together with PUB).

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