In an effort to ease the pain and help my students better understand all of these wonderful concepts, I created some hands-on survey activities for the students to do. (OK, so I had some help coming up with them from a certain engineer that I know, but I translated the engineer-math-speak into eighth-grade-student-speak and created the activity guides almost by myself.) Having a smaller class size (due to their ESL needs) makes implementing these activities a bit easier for me, and entertaining for the staff. I parade the kids around the school, helping them start their data gathering by surveying staff members. The staff (particularly the administration) thinks it's great and everyone laughs at Miss Bowman and her trail of ducklings, but it also has the added benefit of good speaking practice in a safe environment for the kids. Of course I tend to be a bit devious and we started with the Spanish teacher so the kids could ask their questions in Spanish, then I made them translate everything for me. When we arrived at the next teacher and they said they couldn't do it English, I pointed out that they'd just translated it all for me not one minute before and they were had! I wish I could say that was the end of the protestations but I do usually have to bring out the big threat: try or I'll call your mommy. Over all the kids have been doing very well with the activities and are even able to tell me the formula for finding slope and quote slope-intercept format on their own now!
Since this math is far from my forte, and I've only had the opportunity to try these activities once, I've decided to post them here for free download (just click the picture for a pdf). Please, use them with your classes and tell me how it goes!
By the way, integers are difficult for students and my seventh graders have been struggling with comparing and ordering them. In an effort to help them I made an integer war game and had them use the cards to create a human number line as well. After playing the game they created perfect number lines on their own! Of course 20 minutes later they were doing their homework and informed me they didn't know how to order integers. When I pointed out that they'd just done it perfectly with the cards they said, "Cards yes easy, pencil no know." Ah, the logic of middle school students...