Happy Monday!
Over 10 years ago, in June 2012, @pamjwilson and I started a blog series called #Made4Math Mondays. Since then, so many wonderful ideas have been shared from the MTBoS. I kept up with my weekly Monday posts for a long time before it ended up being just a summer thing and then trickled into a very sporadic posting. But I do miss those Mondays - it was a great way to push myself creatively and to come up with new ideas for my classroom.
This year has been a lot about creativity for me. For the past few years, students have been pretty passive participants in the classroom, either due to being online or due to COVID restrictions that kept us from doing more active learning. One of my subgoals this year was to have kids up and around the classroom at least once a week, so an Around the Room Scavenger Hunt is a go-to activity for me!
If you've never used a scavenger hunt, you can see an example at the right. There are 13 problems on this one, which is just about right for the size of my classroom. Each page has a problem at the bottom and a "Previous Answer" spot at the top. Kids start at any problem, record the letter from the top corner, work the problem and go find its answer. If they work through the problems correctly, they should end up back where they started. This scavenger hunt is one I made about a month ago for Triangle Sum Theorem and Exterior Angle Theorem. The problems are from a
Kuta worksheet.
Why I love Scavenger Hunts:
- Gets kids up and moving
- Only takes about 15-20 minutes, so it's a good post-lesson practice
- Kids are more willing to do 13 problems here than a 5-6 question worksheet - go figure!
- Low stakes - the answers are somewhere in the room!
- Kids can work with a different partner
- Promotes mathematical discussion
- I love hearing the "productive noise" that occurs during these!
Okay - are you ready to make your own? All you need is a
copy of the template and 13 problems, each with a unique answer! Here we go...
When you
open the template, it looks a lot like a blank Powerpoint file. I like to start out with the file in Slide Sorter Mode, so it looks very similar to the image on the left.
The first screen is a place for you to record your answer key / order. The rest of the screens are currently in alphabetical order, but I find it easiest to go ahead and scramble them at this point so I can just add my problems in order from screen to screen. After I'm done with all of my problems, I will put it back into alphabetical order so I can print the file to post in my classroom or print to PDF to post on my LMS for absent students.
To add the problems, I just use the Snipping Tool function to copy and paste into the blank section at the bottom of each page, adding any textboxes that I need, then type its answer at the top of the next page in the Previous Answer box. You'll notice that the Previous Answer uses a colon instead of a dash to hopefully reduce confusion with negative answers! You can use any problems you have on hand, but you do need to make sure that each problem has a unique answer and no duplicates!
I often use scavenger hunts to practice a couple of concepts together, as a way to break up our test review days, or as practice after lecture to get them up and moving.
When we do a scavenger hunt, I give students a
half-page recording sheet seen at the right. They record the order of stations at the top, then they have boxes below to show any work. I also put any formulas or tips / hints that I feel might be helpful. One thing I like about the recording sheet is that I can easily check their work with my answer sheet since I just need to shift the paper to see if the letters line up!
In case you missed them above, here are the files:
Thank you for sharing! I think middle schoolers would like this format a lot!
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