System of Equations: Substitution

I absolutely despise teaching my lower level students the substitution method.  But the state always puts a question on the state test about the elimination and substitution methods.  Does anyone else feel this frustration?  I tend to want to jump straight to the calculator for graphing and using matrices.  But in an attempt at tutoring the other day, I had a moment of genius strike!  It inspired a creation of a worksheet...to be shared at a later date.  Note cards served their purpose in class that day.

I made the student flip the card to the other side every time he crossed the equal sign.  He said it was still a lot of work.  You know because our students are professional whiners at times, but he said it did make more sense after doing several problems like this.  Will he more than likely solve systems using a different method?  Yes, but will he recall this activity with this method?  Yes.  For some more eye candy, I have posted my latest notebook additions below.  The yellow chart came from Holt McDougal's powerpoint.

Puzzle builder

I had forgotten about this program until searching on pinterest for algebra 1 activities.  This was a great activity you can use for any topic and any subject.  I plan on changing it a bit because some of my lower level students may have needed part of the puzzle to be solved for them.  Basically, you choose the number of questions you want to be solved based on the puzzle.  Then, you type the question and solution into the input category.  It produces a table of the questions and answers, along with a key for the puzzle.  Awesome activity.  I was able to walk around the classroom more today, than on others.  Tarsia is the name of the program and it is a free download!

Differentiated Quizzes

Normal

Guided take one

Early I had addressed my problem with my lower level students on their quiz and a few of my top fliers as well.  So I feel like my second time around was much better.  I even used this method on the test.  I broke the problems down to find the misconceptions.  I sometimes have to scale back because I want my students to solve the most difficult of problems and they just don't have the capability because they don't understand how to solve a part of the equation.  All of my students seemed to benefit from the more broken down quiz.  I will come back and post links to the quizzes later in case you would like a copy

The new updated versions:

Normal

Broken down

Differentiated Quizzes

Guided quiz

So one of my goals this semester is to differentiate all of my quizzes.  Through classwork and other pre-assessments, I determine which students are still struggling with the concept and which students have mastered the topic.  This way I can see if the child understands the concept or parts of the concept.  I want to know exactly where they went wrong.

Normal quiz ( the 100s on this one gave me some comfort that it had been taught)

I need to re-work my multi-step equations quiz.  After multiple low grades on the last quiz, I have been racking my brain on how to improve the quiz/their learning.  So instead I figured I would open it up for suggestions.  I knew that some students were struggling to grasp what was being distributed in the problem, so I have covered distribution yet again.  I even gave points for highlighting like terms correctly, but I still think it may need to be a bit more guided.  What would you suggest?