Activities to Make Students Check their Solutions to a Solved Linear Equation (free downloads)

I am still here, everyone….maybe a teaching life update is in order soon.

Quick share of a resource that I adapted! I am teaching a year-long block Algebra 1 class this year. So, these students need extra support, mostly because they did not do well in 8th grade math, or maybe 7th grade. Some of them were online students last year and didn’t do much of their work. The way we have it set up is that quarters 1 and 3 are an “Algebra Lab” course, where we work on missing skills and get a head start on the first Algebra 1 standard for the next term, so we can move a bit more slowly. Quarters 2 and 4 we work on the Algebra 1 standards, so they’ll have their full Algebra 1 credit by the end of this year. It’s going well so far. Most of the students seem to be appropriately placed.

But, we’ve started the first Algebra 1 standard of solving linear equations, and almost all of them refuse to check their solutions once they’ve solved, because “that’s too much”. This means that they are a) not really understanding what their solution means or if it makes sense and b) missing points on assessments that they could probably fix pretty easily if they realized they were wrong.

Magic Square Activity

So I was searching for some sort of activity that would force them to check their solutions somehow, and I stumbled upon this Magic Square activity by Katherine Sims. Her activity looks great, and you could totally just use hers. However, my students hadn’t gotten to equations with variables on both sides of the equation yet, so it wasn’t going to work for us.

I decided to just adapt it and rework her equations that had variables on both sides, so that they didn’t, and retype up the activity. Here is my version – the equations may have like terms or distribution, but all the variables are on the same side of the equation. I put this in dry erase pockets, so students solved the equations on their desks with dry erase marker (there isn’t a lot of space on the sheet itself to do this) and then just wrote the solution in the Magic Square.

This forced them to check their solutions, because they got VERY frustrated when they solved all 16 equations and then discovered their row and column totals didn’t match! Most students at that point went back and substituted their solutions back in to find which ones were incorrect.

Sum It Up Activity

I decided to follow this idea as we did move into solving equations with variables on both sides of the equation. I have an activity I use with my Algebra 2 students when they solve exponential equations called “Add Em Up” where they do a set of 4 problems and are given the total of all the solutions to those problems, so they can see when one or more of their answers are wrong. I searched for a similar activity for solving equations and couldn’t quite find what I wanted, so I made my own. Here is Solving Equations Sum it Up!

Looking back, I could have made this activity for variables only on one side of the equation, and just used Katherine’s original activity for the Magic Square, but that kind of logic hasn’t been where my planning brain is going this year so far…

There are six sets of 4 problems, labeled A through F. I printed these on bright green paper and hung them around my room. I had my students working in groups of 2-4 students. Each group got a copy of the record card, and then sent a representative to one of the green sheets to copy down the four equations. When they came back to their group, they divided the work up however they chose and solved the 4 equations. Again, most of my groups quickly learned that the easiest thing was to check your solution using substitution as soon as you solved it so that you weren’t waiting for the other solutions only to find out that the total didn’t work out!!

When they had all 4 solved and adding up to the correct total, they called me over and I put a sticker over the challenge they had completed on their record card. They turned in the record cards when they’d completed all 6 challenges so I could give them practice credit for the activity.

I am really hoping that these two activities convinced some more of my students to check their solutions when they solve equations. Hopefully they are helpful to you if you’re having the same issue!