Or...The best thing about this is watching the students' reactions
The Lesson
- I used this Google slides presentation.
- I showed the video. This was the best part. The kids were so frustrated by the end! I did stop the video right at the part where the food gets brought out to save a few seconds.
- I asked the kids what they noticed/wondered. Here were some responses:
- I noticed that guy's going to get really fat.
- I noticed that he kept ordering the same things over and over again, like a small coke and a small coke.
- I noticed they kept saying the same order over and over again instead of saying it shorter.
- I wanted to bang my head against the wall the 4th time they said the order.
- I noticed there were different ways to make $11 at the end.
- If I were that lady I'd tell the guy to go somewhere else.
- They were talking really fast!
- After asking the question presented, I passed out one copy of the original order per group in a plastic sleeve. Students spent about 5 minutes making the order more efficient.
- I found it interesting that some groups decided to add all the cheeseburgers together and all the hamburgers together. They said they'd just tell the guy they don't do special orders. :)
- I thought it would be fun to make the connection to how In-n-Out reads back their orders. If you've never been, they combine all like items together: "1 hamburgers, 2 cheeseburger, 3 fries and 3 drinks."
- This is kind of a West Coast thing...so if you don't have In-n-Out, I'm not sure this would be relevant to your students.
- After a quick discussion on the relevance to combining like terms, we took a few notes. and did some practice.
My Thoughts
- This lesson was lots of fun. It really hooked the kids and it seems like they made the connection to combining like terms.
- They wasted a bit of time just reading the script right after I passed it out. This was just supposed to be a review lesson for my 8th graders so I didn't want to spend too much time on it which is why I only gave them 5 minutes to rewrite the script. Most groups did not completely finish, but they got the idea. If this were the first experience students had with combining like terms I would absolutely give them enough time to rewrite the script.
- Even though they "hated" the video, every class asked me if I would post it on Google Classroom.
- If I do combining like terms review again next year, I will most likely use the video again.