Grade 9 & Grade 10 Academic

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another exciting week in the world of math. This week I had the pleasure of watching my colleagues run activities in Grade 9 and 10 academic math, and what an eventful evening it was! During our time in class, we had the pleasure of being introduced to a speed dating activity that will make sure your class stays engaged and meets the success criteria in your linear relations unit.

The activity was called "Speed Dating and Equation Making", and is suitable for all grade levels with a little bit of tweaking. In order to run the activity, the desks first need to be moved in order to create a "U" shape around the classroom. The "U" shape is made with two circles, an inner circle and an outer circle. This way the desks are facing each other, similar to a speed dating session.

Materials Needed:

-Flash Cards

-Graphing Paper

-Pencils/Different colour pencil crayons

-Ruler

Once you have the desks set up and the materials you need, you are ready to start this fun and exciting activity! There are two different type of flash cards, one flash card contains the y-intercept, while another flash card contains a word problem that identifies your slope. Now every student in the inner circle gets the same type of flash card (for instance all slope cards), while everyone on the outer circle gets the other type of flash card (the y-intercept). Students then take their seat and put the two flashcards together to create a line. They then have to graph their line on the graph paper provided. On the graph paper, there are several points that are indicated with a heart. If the line you and your partner create go through the heart, you are a match! After about one minute, all the people on the inner circle get up and move on to their next "date", where the process repeats itself and you see if you both are compatible and are a match! 

I thoroughly enjoyed this activity because it was fun creating the lines and seeing if I got a potential date. In the math classroom, students often are given worksheets with repetitive drills to consolidate their learning. While this practice is key to learning any concept, it can be quite boring. This activity allows students to consolidate their graphing and linear skills while at the same time keeping them engaged. The students do not even realize they are doing math work because they are so caught up in the game trying to get the most dates! 

In my future classroom I will definitely be using this activity. Not only can it be used for creating linear equations, but even across other grade levels this game can be tweaked in order to incorporate quadratics, trigonometry and other parts of the math curriculum.