Graphing Linear Equations | Engaging Activity for Teaching Slope-Intercept Form

This last school year I taught 7th grade math for the first time, after over a decade in 8th grade math, and it was a real eye-opener for me. There were so many concepts I assumed my students had been exposed to prior to coming in to 8th that really hadn’t been taught in depth–the biggest of these being graphing!

When I started an 8th grade school year, we’d always jumped right into graphing linear equations as if the students were very familiar already. And while they had seen these concepts previously, having now gone through the 7th grade standards as a teacher it’s clear to me that my kiddos were definitely not as familiar as I’d assumed.

Worse, my curriculum really didn’t really do justice to beginning graphing lessons. You know those activities, where they go from graphing something simple like y = 3/4x + 2 straight to x = 4 and the kids go from “this is easy!” to “what the heck do I do with this?!” in a millisecond.

I needed something more specific than that.

I’m a big believer in teaching in “baby steps.” This is what I told my 7th graders all year, that sometimes we were doing baby steps to prepare for the long jump later on in 8th grade and high school. They seemed to like this analogy. (And it really helped my “this is too easy!” students understand the reason for spending purposeful time on the basics.) 

When I set out to teach them how to graph so they would actually be prepared for 8th grade graphing, I knew I needed to create a good “baby step” program. One that would get them comfortable with all kinds of linear equations that they would come across.

And, of course, one that was engaging and fun, because that’s always what math class should be about.

That’s how “Catch That Cat!” came into existence.

I absolutely love how these turned out. They are exactly what my students needed, especially the ones that tend to struggle keeping up with the rest of the class. For the first few levels, there aren’t any concepts that have to be mastered ahead of time, so it really is very accessible to every student. Even my first grader at home was able to the first two levels after a quick tutorial.

We spent about 3 days total on this activity, with me demonstrating the first few problems of the current level under the doc cam, then releasing students to work independently or in small groups for about 20 minutes before gathering together again for the next level. Together, we got through the first five lessons, but since I allowed students to work ahead if they were quick to master the lower levels, plenty of kids finished all 8 (the last three of which covered more of what they would experience in 8th grade and high school).

By the time we reached the test at the end of the unit, I had more than 90% of students who had successfully mastered graphing basic linear equations at the 7th grade level (Levels 1-5), and about 40% of students who had mastered all 8 levels. Definitely a win for all of us. 

In this example, students have already gone through five different levels of graphing and are comfortable graphing basic linear equations in all four quadrants. This level ramps things up by introducing slopes in decimal form and students learn the convenience of converting from decimal to fraction form for graphing purposes.