Order of Operations Scavenger Hunt

So many of you are off on Spring break, and I am SUPER jealous! In Massachusetts, we don't have one March spring break, but instead have a week in February and a week in April. That leaves us with this loooooooong, endless chunk of time right before state testing that I affectionately refer to as March Madness. The kids are going stir crazy, the teachers are tired, and the test is almost here. It's hard for everyone! So, in an effort to get my friends to pay attention, I decided it was time to jazz up my lesson plans. With the help of a super creative co-worker (who thought of so much of this) we decided to do an Order of Operations Easter Egg Hunt Egg-stravaganza!

I started off by reviewing the order of operations and using my "Order of Operations without Aunt Sally" freebie. This really helps my kiddos understand the correct way to perform the order of operations without relying so heavily on "PEMDAS."

If you are interested, you can read more about that from my previous post here.

Thanks to Easter egg sales and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, this lesson was pretty easy to put together. I found the Order of Operations bingo from the NCTM Illuminations website. I made a few modifications to make it work with an easter egg hunt though.

First, I labeled all the problems with letters so the kiddos could put them on their recording sheet and keep track of which one they solved. This would help me correct their work later on in the day, as well.

After that, I cut up the problems and removed the answer. Then, I put 2 or 3 of them in each Easter egg. 

Then, I hid the eggs (in plain sight) all around my classroom!

The original game is meant to be played as Bingo, so the recording sheet is built for that.

I love the idea of having the kids record their answers in a column that corresponds to the value, so I decided just to cut the word "bingo" off the top when I photocopied them. As the kiddos found the values of the expressions, they wrote down the value AND the the letter that I had labeled the strip of paper with. This way, when we went over our work it was easy to tell if they solved the expression correctly. To amp up the "fun factor" my kiddos were trying to fill an entire card with correct solutions for a small prize. 

So, with a few modifications, Order of Operations Bingo become our Egg Hunt Egg-stravaganza! How do you add the "fun factor" into teaching this time of year?