Week Six - Napkins and Place Mats Color Tiles Lesson Plan

CLICK HERE for the lesson plan and the supporting documents.

The objectives of this lesson are to identify and extend patterns, explore the sequence of perfect squares, make predictions based on patterns, and express relationships algebraically.

I had four eighth grade students do the activities in this lesson at lunch on Thursday. They enjoyed the lesson, but they found the part where they had to come up with algebraic expressions to be very challenging. This is likely because the students that volunteered to do the activities are in the lowest eighth grade math level. If they were in algebra then these activities would have been a lot easier for them because they would have been used to expressing problems algebraically. However, with a lot of assistance, the students were able to come up with algebraic expressions to represent the patterns they saw.

On another note, when the students were working on the activities from this lesson I could see that they were very good at identifying patterns and relationships. Thus, they found all aspects other than the part that specifically relates to algebra to be relatively easy.

Also, after the students completed the activities, I felt a sense of accomplishment because I was able to reinforce concepts related to patterns and relationships and help students with the difficult task of learning algebra. In essence, I was able to help students discover math patterns and express them algebraically.