Back to school has been pure craziness. I feel like I'm starting to get into the groove of things, but I'm definitely grateful that we have a three day weekend coming up pronto!
These scientific notation notes were created for my physical science class that I am teaching this year. This is my first time ever teaching scientific notation since it is a middle school math standard in Oklahoma.
We started with a discussion of why scientific notation is useful and what it looks like.
Then, we completed a foldable on converting to and from scientific notation.
Here's what the inside looks like:
Ignore the shiny tape. I got a bit excited and accidentally ripped my foldable!
I really tried to set this up in such a way that my students needed to think about what the exponent on the 10 meant instead of just memorizing whether they should move the decimal to the left or right.
After doing a few in-class activities that I'll put in another blog post, we did two activities in our notebook to practice our scientific notation skills.
The first one was a ranking problem from the MARS Size It Up lesson. (I didn't use the lesson - just the chart from page 13).
Our final notebook activity was the Giantburgers task. My physical science found this task to be tricky because they really struggled to wrap their mind around what percent means. I guess it's a good thing their teacher has a math degree. ;)
I've uploaded the files for this lesson here.