PEMDAS: A Skeleton of My Former Self KAHOOT

We began our class today by graphing student results from yesterday's Countdown to STAAR.  The purpose of graphing is for my students to see their progress in the Categories they may have struggled with in 4th Grade.  The kids enjoyed this, especially since we use Google Classroom to house the spreadsheet.... there is nothing to misplace and we don't have to hunt for map pencils!

Our learning goal today was to "simplify numeric expressions, that do not include exponents, but include up to two sets of grouping.  Basically, we worked with the order of operations or PEMDAS again today.  I began by asking them to discuss with their table this prompt:

They did a very good job in deducing that they would use PEMDAS to find the numerator, but they had no idea what to do with the "4".  I wanted them to understand that a fraction can always be looked at as a division problem, so I showed them:

Once we knew we were dealing with a division problem, we worked together to simplify the expression beginning with the numerator.  This problem was pretty involved and I wanted them to have some success with working with PEMDAS, so I had them play a KAHOOT.

When I designed the KAHOOT, I used a worksheet called "A Skeleton of My Former Self" from The Mailbox Magazine, Oct/Nov 2007.  What I liked about the worksheet is that the answers to the equations answer a human body factoid.  Not only that, the skeleton also seems to fit with October....

They very much enjoyed the KAHOOT and I am always amazed at the amount of math they will happily complete when they are using a computer and a dry erase marker!

To finish up the lesson, I asked the kids to answer the prompt:

I wanted them to think about using the Order of Operations using different view points in an effort to see that this concept is useful outside of the elementary classroom.