Algebra Tiles...Who Knew!

A while back in class we did a lesson involving algebra tiles. This was the first time that I had ever experienced this type of a manipulative. I had never used them before and after being able to experiment with them in class and to see what you could do with them I am a big fan. You can use them for modeling, simplifying, solving, factoring and much more. I have been looking online for resources for how to use algebra tiles and it seems like the possibilities are endless. I started by looking up the prices and found that a classroom set would cost about $80 for a class of about 30. The cost seems a little high especially knowing that the teachers in my district normally only get about $80 a year for all of their classroom supplies. So I guess if you do not need anything else for your room you could go that way. I did find some other more cost effective alternatives. One would be to have the students make their own set using a template. You would want to use a little more of a heavier card stock paper and then you could get Ziploc bags for storage. One template I found was here http://mathbits.com/MathBits/AlgebraTiles/Algebra%20Tile%20Template.pdf .

I then found some great resources where you would not even need to have your own set of tiles, but instead you would use virtual tiles. If you had access to tablet, iPads, or laptops in your classroom this may be the best way to go. With these sites you can add tiles to a work area to create equations, to manipulate them, and even solve. The other thing that I liked about these sites was that a lot of them had built in lesson that you could use if you wanted and it would check the students work. You could also have problems on the board and the students could enter them into the site and then turn their screens around, where you could do a very easy visual check of their answers. Students could also work in groups very easily if you were not able to be one-to-one. Some of the ones I likes were:

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/topic_t_2.html
http://a4a.learnport.org/page/algebra-tiles
http://my.hrw.com/math06_07/nsmedia/tools/Algebra_Tiles/Algebra_Tiles.html
http://www.classzone.com/cz/books/msmath_3_na/resources/applications/animations/chapter_3/swf/g8_3_3.swf

As I was searching I also came across some activities that you could use with either type of algebra tile, but some of them are a little more geared toward the ones students can physically manipulate. One is a starter activity and the other deals with the distributive property. I also found a couple of power points that had some different ways to use the tiles and some activities to do with your classes.

http://mathinscience.info/public/around_block/old/discover.pdf
http://westlakeeagles.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/0/3/13037123/distributivepropertywithalgebratilesv3.0.pdf
http://mathbits.com/MathBits/AlgebraTiles/AlgebraTiles/AlgebraTiles.html
http://www.trianglehighfive.org/pdf/005_algebra_tiles.pdf

I also found a site that you could use to test students knowledge and understanding of the algebra tiles.

http://www.ixl.com/math/grade-7/model-and-solve-equations-using-algebra-tiles

Overall I feel that this is a very valuable tool for all of your students. Students that learn better with a more hands-on approach will definitely get a lot out of the lessons that use these, but so will your top students. I have always been able to understand math very well and I think after working with these tiles I made a bit deeper connection with working with polynomials than I had before. This is a very valuable resource and I will be finding a way to use it in my math classroom.