They actually ask to play it during their study hall! Mathonopoly

I brought this game in to review congruent triangle postulates and the students absolutely loved it!  I kid you not I had students ask to borrow the game to play during their study hall period.

I don't remember where I found this idea, but there are several lower level math monopoly boards out there.

There is quite a setup with it, but once you get your cards assembled it is a quick and fun go to for review of quick skills.  I wouldn't suggest using this for something like solving multistep equations, but something like very basic factoring would work perfectly (ie x^2 + 4x + 4).  I first used this with recognizing triangle congruent theorems from pictures.  

The cards from my templates are personalized to my classroom so should you decide to use it you may want to look through the chance and community chest cards to personalize to your classroom.  These are the cards that make the game so fun! 

It's played very similar to Monopoly.  I use points instead of dollars and start everyone off with 200 points.  When a player lands on a number they pull that number card out of the stack and try to answer.  Someone else checks their answer from the back of the card.  If they get it right then they own that space and anytime someone lands on their space there is an exchange of points based on the number associated with that space.  If they land on a community chest or chance card then they chose a card from the appropriate stack and do as it says.  I used the other spaces (electric company and the train spots) as just safe places but you can set different parameters of course.  I usually let my classes decide if points should be lost for getting the wrong answer.  

I find it works best in groups of three or four.  

Besides the printouts, the other materials you will need are die and player pieces.  

The cards are meant to be manually fed front to back in a printer (ie not a copier).

Mathonopoly - Congruent triangles

A new way to give a worksheet...Question Stack

I have had the greatest opportunity of attending the Greene County Math Drive-In several times and each time I walk away with some really awesome resources.  If you have the opportunity to attend one I promise you will not regret it.  The concept is catching on in other subjects and other areas of NC.

So one activity I've taken away and used SEVERAL times is the Question Stack.  What you do is take a worksheet (I typically use kutasoftware worksheets with the answers) and put a problem on one side of a card with the answer to another problem on the back.

The students would work a problem, find the answer on another card and put the answer on top of the problem so that a new problem is showing.  They solve the new problem and continue to stack up the cards until they are all stacked.  The answer to the top problem should be on the bottom of the stack.

The students typically prefer this over just working through a worksheet...especially if there is some sort of incentive for the first group to finish.

I have made several Question Stacks for many different topics.  The templates are made to be manually fed through a printer (ie NOT in a copier).  I usually print them on bright cardstock and they have held up well over the years.  Laminating would probably last a lot longer (and discourage writing on the cards).

The Unit Circle

So I totally stole this from another blogger who stole it from a student (how cool is that?!?).

I used different methods with each of my three classes and the best method I thought was to work with one triangle (I used the 45-45-90) all the way around the circle filling in the degrees and the coordinates.  Then I filled in the first quadrant with the other two triangles and let the students work their way around the circle based on what we had in the first quadrant (again just the degrees and ordered pairs).  We then came back and worked with converting the degrees to radians.

The templates can be found at this link (thanks to the original blogger - Math Teacher Mambo!)  

The coolest trig foldable!

I found this style of foldable browsing around one day and just KNEW it had to be a part of my class somehow!  It is the coolest thing since sliced bread when it comes to foldables.....and what's even better is that the students think so too!!!

This is my adaptation of the foldable for trig functions.  On the outside you can see the basic SohCahToa with triangles where you set up the ratios (including it related back to the unit circle in the coordinate plane).  Then there's a section where you solve for missing sides in triangles...both where the variable is up high (multiply) and down (divide).  The last section is where you would solve for angles.  In the secret section (cue the shocked faces of your students) is where they look at the graphs of sine and cosine (tangent wasn't in our AFM standards, but I'm sure you could find a way to fit in if needed).

This would also be a good spot to refer back to function transformations and discuss how it all relates.

Secret Door Trig foldable front view

Secret door trig foldable inside view

The magic