Oragmi Envelopes might be cool, but never again!

We're still reviewing since the kids took a pre-assessment for my class and bombed it!  The kids are truly coming to me at a low level.  I wanted the check for an understanding of 8th grade math skills.  I chose easy to difficult level problems.  The students did well on order of operations since I had already covered this topic in our review, but other areas were poor. 

Today in response to the scores, we reviewed adding integers today.  We used algebra tiles that the kids cut out from card-stock.  We used them with a worksheet from Cooperative Learning & Algebra 1 by Becky Bride.  It's a great resource to have in any Algebra class.  

We then followed the oragami envelope steps, but it did take more time than usual.  I figured with Valentine's day coming up it would be neat for them to learn, plus it holds all of their algebra tiles in something they created.  We also used a foldable and blank number lines for our notes today.  Overall, they grasped the concept and we can move on to the next issue on the assessment.