Student Actions

Teacher Actions

• Develop Accurate and Appropriate Procedural Fluency by using substitution and mental math to check solutions for expressions involving variables when the variable value is known.

• Develop Mathematical Reasoning by monitoring and evaluating the reasonableness of their results and make adjustments as needed throughout the problem solving process.

• Develop a Deep and Flexible Conceptual Understanding by representing the idea of a variable as an unknown quantity using a letter or a symbol and use algebraic concepts and processes to represent and solve problems that involve variable quantities.

• Implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving that provide students with real world experiences that involve evaluating expressions that involve the known value for a variable.

• Support productive struggle by encouraging students to evaluate the appropriateness of their solutions and those of their peers.

• Use and connect mathematical representations by encouraging students to use developmentally and content-­appropriate mathematical models when working with variables.

Key Understandings

Misconceptions

• Replace a variable with a given value and solve

• Understand that value can be represented by different variables

• Understand that variables are typically a letter that represents a number, but can be represented by a symbol

• Think letters are only used as abbreviations

• EX. 6m meaning 6 meters

• Believe that a letter represents a digit in a number

• EX. 6r where r=8 is 68

• Think that numbers on the left of the equation have the operation followed by the equals sign and the answer on the right. If the answer is on the left followed by the equals sign and the operation is on the right, it is backwards and can't be solved  (c = a+b)