Pair Race Activity

Finding new activities that can be used to help basic mathematical skill development can be difficult.  I ran across this idea last year at another blog (I'd credit the blogger if I could remember where I found this) when I was looking for something to use to practice operations with rational expressions.  I've used this idea with both honors students and students who struggle and it worked great with both groups.  Sometimes a little competition goes a long way to motivate kids to work on something they wouldn't otherwise want to do.

The way this activity works is that you design two sets of questions that have the same answers, then pair the kids up.  I have my students turn their desks to face each other and put the page between them with a question set facing each student.  Each student has to work through their question set and the partners compare answers as they go.  If the answers don't match they have to check their work and figure out who made a mistake.  My kids really seemed to enjoy the competitive aspect of this activity.  I normally turn it into a race and give out a small prize for the first 3 groups to finish, or for the 3 groups that get the most completed correctly with all work shown.

Here is a sample of the questions on multiplying square roots that I used with my kids yesterday.  The students in this class are all a semester behind in math and they did GREAT with it.  It is definitely an activity that can be tailored to groups of students of all ability and motivation levels.