Teaching the Distributive Property and Combining Like Terms with Combo Meals

Teaching the distributive property and combining like terms can be stressful but it can also be a lot of fun and engaging with these ideas for distributive property activities. My two favorite strategies include combo meals and color-coding. The best way to start this lesson is with the MADtv video from my combining like terms lesson.

Day 1  – Introduce to the Distributive Property and Combining Like Terms with Combo Meals (Positive Numbers Only)

Students should already have a bit of background knowledge of the distributive property and integers from 6th grade. Activate that background knowledge after watching the MADtv combining like terms lesson, ask students if they know what a combo meal is. Then, display a slide like this one on the board (my favorite combo meal from Mickey D’s is the two cheeseburger meal, so that’s what I went with!).

Then, ask students what would they need to do if a customer wanted two of them?

How many of each item would they need to give?

Use this as a chance to connect it to the distributive property!

Now, connect it to combining like terms by posing the question,

 “What if different combo meals were ordered from the same car?” This is one of my all-time favorite distributive property activities. Students can work alone or in pairs to determine the customer orders. Then they must combine like terms!

Day 2 – Introduce Negative Numbers

Now it’s time to swap out those combo meals for integers! I pass out distributive property and combining like terms notes and instruct students to take out two different color pens. We go through each example together.

Emphasize the importance of being careful with distributing to a negative inside of the parentheses and distributing a -1.

Another good strategy to try: area models! But warning, I hear Algebra teachers don’t love this.

Students then finish the Combining Like Terms with Emojis activity from the combining like terms lesson.

Conclusion

If you try any of these ideas for teaching the distributive property and combining like terms or use the distributive property activities, let me know how it goes!

Head over to the next blog post, all about teaching multi step equations!