In Algebra 1, I split the Solving Equations unit into two parts. The first part was just all of the standard solving equations. In the second part I did ratios, rates, and proportions.
On this page, I had my students do a review of ratios and rates from Pre-Algebra. My students are very familiar with these two concepts because our Pre-Algebra teacher spends TONS of time on them. The unit conversion at the bottom of the page was a little bit of a struggle. I just typed out problems that I found in their textbook and online.
Next, I had a page for proportions. I copied the definition from our textbook, and typed a word problem that I found. I used half of the foldable by Lisa Davenport. There was another portion to this foldable, but it covered things that aren’t in our Algebra 1 standards.
I put a lot of thought into how I would teach proportions this year. I asked the MTBoS on Twitter for suggestions. My students came to me having used cross products in the past. So, I referenced it at the top of the page. I ended up showing three different ways to solve algebraic proportions.
- I had my students get a common denominator, then multiply by the common denominator. This was great…sort of. They got the idea of what we were doing, but if the x was in the denominator, this method falls apart. In Algebra 1, they don’t yet have the skills to solve this type of problem.
- I had my students multiply by one denominator, then multiply by the other. Essentially, it broke the cross products into two separate steps. This confused my students a lot.
- Last, I had my students use cross products. They were less confused by this method, because they’ve seen it before.
I liked showing them three different ways to solve a problem. However, after that I let them choose the method they liked the best. Most of them prefer cross products. I haven’t graded their tests yet, so we’ll see how it went.
