Math
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Area of a Triangle: Three Formulas Every Geometry Student Needs to Know
How I Teach Area of a Triangle in Geometry — Caryn Loves Math For most of my teaching career, I thought I knew everything there was to know about finding the area of a triangle. Half the base times the height. That’s it. Done. Then I started teaching Geometry. The first year, I opened the…
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Walk-Around Activity — The Format I Use in Every Algebra Unit
The One Activity Format I Use in Every Algebra Unit — Caryn Loves Math There’s a good chance you’ve heard of this format under a different name. Some teachers call it a scavenger hunt. Some call it a gallery walk. Some just call it “the card activity.” I call it a walk-around activity, and I’ve…
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How I Use Walk-Around Activities to Teach Graphing All Year
How I Use Walk-Around Activities to Teach Graphing All Year — Caryn Loves Math If you’ve never used a graphing walk-around activity in your classroom, the concept is simple: problems are posted around the room on cards, students move from card to card solving as they go, and the answer to each problem tells them…
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Beyond the Worksheet: 6 Complex Number Activities That Keep Students Engaged
6 Activity Formats That Build Complex Number Fluency — Caryn Loves Math Every year, the same thing happens when we get to complex numbers. Finding complex number activities that actually work — not just keep students busy — is harder than it sounds. Students who have been confident all unit suddenly look at me like…
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Teaching Imaginary Numbers — Why I Introduce i on Day One
Why I Introduce i on Day One — Caryn Loves Math Math · 2026 Why I Introduce i on Day One (And Why It Changes Everything) “After 30 years of teaching this unit, I finally figured out what students actually struggle with — and it’s not imaginary numbers themselves.” When I first started teaching quadratics,…
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10 Classroom Supplies Math Teachers Would Love You to Donate
10 Classroom Supplies Math Teachers Would Love You to Donate | Caryn Loves Math Classroom Resources 10 Classroom Supplies Math Teachers Would Love You to Donate Real items from a real math classroom — bought in bulk, used every single year By Caryn · High School Math Teacher 📌 This post contains affiliate links. As…
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Quadratic Formula — How I Teach It in Algebra 2
How I Teach the Quadratic Formula in Algebra 2 By the time we reach the quadratic formula, my students have already solved by graphing, solved by factoring, used the square root property, and worked with imaginary numbers. So when I introduce the quadratic formula, it’s not the first method they see. It’s the method that…
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Square Root Property — Why Order Matters When Teaching It
Most students think the hard part is remembering the ± sign. It’s not. After teaching this for years, I’ve learned that the isolate step is what trips them up every time — and if you don’t teach that explicitly, everything else falls apart. Irrational numbers. Imaginary numbers. Multi-step equations. Algebraic structure. All at the same…
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Completing the Square — A Step-by-Step Approach That Works
“Completing the square trips up even strong students. Here’s how I structure the lesson so they actually understand it — not just memorize steps.”
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Matching Activities — A Powerful Check for Understanding in Math
“There’s a moment in every lesson when I need to know: do my students actually get it? Here’s the classroom structure I use to find out — before it’s too late to fix it.”