How to Practice Order of Operations?
Students love finding mistakes, especially mistakes the teacher or their peers make. I always had a tally on the board of how many mistakes that I made in math class. Finding mistakes is a higher level thinking skill because students have to understand the concept enough to be able to find where something went wrong.
One of my favorite activities for order of operations was having students look for errors when it came to solving the expressions. You can do this with little prep as long as you have a few order of operations problems and some dry erase markers like in this post.
I also put together this presentation for 5th grade math. Each slide has an order of operation problem solved with two different answers. Students have to find which one is correct and you can take it a step further by ask him to find what mistake did someone make to get the wrong answer.
Now students are quick to find mistakes of their peers and their teachers, but when it comes to finding their own mistakes it can be a struggle. But however if we continue to expose them to common misconceptions and common mistakes and point them out hopefully they will remember them when they are solving problems on their own.
Here are some other resources for order of operations that you might be able to use.
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