In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.
I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).
This student submission comes from my former student Claire McMahon. Her topic, from Algebra I: multiplying binomials like 
I personally have had the pleasure of teaching this part of Algebra 1 to a freshman high school class. The greatest part about the lesson was how the students were able to work together to really figure all of them out and better yet, they knew why! You can use several different versions of BINGO for practically anything in math. And who doesn’t love to win prizes. This website in particular has led me to some really great lesson plans and I credit a lot of this blog to a lot of the lesson plans I have personally implemented. Almost every one of them worked with almost little to no tweaking. I’m not exactly a huge fan of the FOIL concept so I used BINO instead of Bingo!! Just like singing the song and insert joke here. So here is the lesson on Distributive Bingo and how it works. The basic rundown is you give the students either the polynomial or the already factored binomials and have them solve it one way or the other. For example, if you are trying to focus more on the factoring and zeros making them go from a polynomial to factoring is good practice. The other really great thing is you can build scaffolds into the game itself by passing out hint cards or key concepts to help them figure out what they are looking for, similar to a formula sheet.
One of the great things about the Internet is there is so much information constantly flowing in and out at all times. YouTube is a great asset when trying to reinforce good study habits and good metacognition. Most students are very visual and it gives step-by-step instructions on how to do almost anything. The other key thing is they can pause rewind and replay if necessary. If you prefer to have a safer environment for your students to browse then you can lean them toward teacher tube, which has all the same resources without the junk videos. Here is one of the many multiplying videos that show a method similar to a Punnet Square, which is in line with learning genetics and heredity. They might have already learned this in biology but if not then it’s a great visual representation of a multiplication table and they will learn it again in science. It’s easy for the students to check their work and for you to see where any misconceptions can arise.
Algebra tiles are an amazing tool for teaching area models and multiplying binomials. There are virtual algebra tiles found on the Internet and also many different websites that you can buy a classroom set. I recommend your students to get used to because they show the value of negative and positive and how multiplying, adding, subtracting or dividing positive and negative integers affects the outcome. This concept is very important when you are learning to multiply binomials and is often lost or was never present in many student’s previous studies. You need to make sure that these basic skill benchmarks are met before embarking on an algebra tiles journey. If you teach the basic rules to play with algebra tiles then you will be set in teaching them multiplication and factoring of binomials and polynomials. We all love a journey of understanding and this is one of the most awesome tools that students can use to “do math.”
Mean Green Math 