Story Time

I was looking around for some more blogs to follow and stumbled upon mathycathy's blog.  She teaches eight grade algebra and her students have been solving multi-step equations.  Instead of just giving the students an equation and telling them to solve for a, she had the students tell the story behind the equation.  She had the students create their own word problems after being given a certain equation.  I absolutely love this idea!  This activity gets the students really thinking outside of the box and checks for real understanding of the equation.  It also makes solving equations much more fine.  She said the students were also very excited and said it was hard to describe the energy in the room.  I will definitely be using something like this in my classroom one day.