Muscle Man

The muscle man has become the daily phrase utilized in my classroom.  I have to say, I was getting a little tired of the whole balance spiel.  It felt like it was time for a change...and a change it was!  While introducing solving equations to my pre-algebra class, I showed the following video from YouTube.

I then had all of the students stand up and pretend to be the "muscle man".  We then pretended to lift the weights and then drop them.  Next, I told them that someone put on too much weight on the left side of the bar.  They had to show me what would happen to the "muscle man".  They all tipped right over!  We continued with a few other scenarios until I could see that they all understood the balancing aspect of a muscle man.

From there, I had them paste the "muscle man" into their ISN (interactive student notebook).  Students were given the equation x+2=4  This matched up with the number of weights on the bar that our man was lifting.

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The middle of the muscle man, or his core (yep, I threw in a PE reference!), was the balance.  If his balance was off, there went his championship in front of the whole world!  We discussed what would happen if we had to add addition weight to both sides.  The muscle man would have to be balanced and that weight would have to be added to both sides.  Whatever we did to one side, we did to the other.  Now the students are always saying to me, "Oh yeah, we do the muscle man!"  It worked out much better than I anticipated, but still need something else with a few students that do not understand equations involving integers.....but no fear, bingo daubers are near!!!  To Be Continued....