In this partner activity, students take turns matching expressions that are equivalent because of the distributive property. As students trade roles explaining their thinking and listening, they have opportunities to explain their reasoning and critique the reasoning of others (MP3).

Direct students’ attention to the reference created using Collect and Display. Ask students to share their strategy for picking an expression in Column B and finding the match in Column B. Invite students to borrow language from the display as needed. As they respond, update the reference to include additional phrases.

Once all groups have completed the matching, discuss questions such as: 

• “Which matches were tricky? What makes them so?”
• “Did you need to make adjustments in your matches? What adjustments were made?”
• “If you made an error, what might have caused it?”

In this activity, students generate equivalent algebraic expressions using the distributive property. They practice writing a sum or difference when given a product, and a product when given a sum or difference. Although most expressions will be familiar to students from previous lessons, they also include some unfamiliar variants. For example, has the expression in parentheses first, and products vary in whether the variable is the common factor or included in the expression in parentheses. The sums and differences include variables as the common factor and others include more than two terms. 

Ask students to review the rows where they had to generate an equivalent expression for a given sum or difference. Invite students to explain how they decided what term to use as the common factor, and what terms to use in the expression inside the parentheses.

Highlight that for some expressions, there are multiple equivalent expressions that can be written. For example, the terms in the expression has 2 and 4 as common factors, so we can write and .