It’s been a busy start to school and I haven’t written in a while, but I’m back at it tonight. I wanted to share a quick formative assessment you can use with your students that a teacher on my team shared with us. This is meant to be used with something that students can do and say quickly. We used it to check student’s understanding of Functions and Relations after teaching/reviewing it the day before. My coworker, Nicole, created cards of graphs, coordinate points, tables, and mappings that were either a function or relation with the answer on the back (thanks for making these, Nicole). We gave our students one card each and explained the directions:

1. You will show the picture side of your card to another classmate and ask, “is this a function or relation?”

2. If your partner gets it right, they will ask you the same thing about their card.

3. If you’re right, trade cards and go quiz someone else in the room. If either of you get it wrong, be sure to explain why before trading cards and moving on.

4. Your goal is to quiz everyone in the room before time runs out!

Honestly I was a little nervous of doing this activity because I have some very active classes, but this helped start our class with a kinesthetic activity to get some energy and talking out in a productive way. We did this as a quick 4 minute warm up, so it was something they could stay on task with that was different than a traditional paper to pencil warm up…the timer that I displayed on the board also helped regulate it for my more active classes. I also would encourage you as a teacher to play along…I got a card and played with them which helped me hear which students knew the concept and which needed more intervention on the topic.

Happy quiz-quiz-trading!!