How is it that even after several years of teaching 6th grade, I can still go to my old files looking for stuff to teach an upcoming unit and find pretty much nothing? How? How does this happen? I know I taught it in the past, but what did I do?
This happened with a recent unit on surface area and volume, so I created two scavenger activities. One on surface area and volume and another with word problems on the same stuff.
I’ve been using “loop” activities or “scavenger hunts” for a while. I especially like them for the times when I need students to practice a specific type of problem. It’s a great way to disguise a worksheet as an activity. I love that they are self checking and get students up and moving around.
I have tried a few different ways of creating this type of activity up when making my own. This is what I’ve found to be most efficient for me when I’m making the activity. On the top of a sheet of paper I put the first problem. Then I put the answer to that problem on the bottom of the next sheet. It’s been a big help for students to make the font as big as possible so that students can see it from a ways away. Then on the top of that sheet I put the next problem. The final answer goes on the bottom of the first sheet. At the end of the activity, I am able to check students’ work by checking the order of their answers.
Students can start at any card. They solve the problem and find that answer on another sheet. This continues until they have done all the problems. If they do everything correctly, they will end up back where they started.
Because this is a self checking activity for students, I tend to be “less helpful” to students while they are working on activities like this.
And an added bonus is that you can hang the problems just as well to the outside of the school as you can the walls of your classroom. So when it’s beautiful outside and your class has been awesome all week, you take them outside. 🙂
Here are the links to download the activities.
Update: I also uploaded an area review worksheet I used to intro this unit. I’m trying to incorporate more self-check assignments for my students so they know whether or not they are on the right track while working on them.
I also thought I’d share the documents I used to create the images for these activities. I recently discovered I can use Google Drawings to create prisms. It works really well for triangular prisms and rectangular prisms. It’s not quite as easy to create trapezoidal prisms, but it was the best I found. Here is the link to the images I made for the surface area and volume scavenger hunt, and here is the link to the images for the word problem scavenger hunt.
Count It All Joy 