Joy of Teaching» beginning algebra http://www.mrsjoyhall.com Where a love of special education and technology bring a new spin to classroom learning! Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:12:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Equations and Inequalities http://www.mrsjoyhall.com/equations-and-inequalities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=equations-and-inequalities http://www.mrsjoyhall.com/equations-and-inequalities/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:04:57 +0000 mrsjoyhall http://www.mrsjoyhall.com/?p=153 Welcome to the wonderful world of algebra!  At least that’s what I said to the fifth graders a few weeks ago.  When I began planning for the introduction of algebra, I decided to incorporate a pretest to see where their current skills were.  Boy was I surprised!  Most of them couldn’t tell the difference between the greater than or less than signs!  Now I know I have my work cut out for me.  I was so glad to know where to begin with them, that I thought there might be other teachers who could use the pretests, also.  (My little trick for keeping the symbols straight is that Less Than looks like a Lazy L!)

There are three different pretests that I made.  The first one is a third of a page and asks the kids to write the symbol that corresponds with the statement.  The second half-page pretest asks the students to write what each symbol stands for.  The last pretest is a full page that has them match equations and inequalities with the statements that go with them.  It was eye-opening for me to see what little knowledge they had of algebra.  I hope you find these pretests on equations and inequalities as helpful as I have!

 

 

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