Looking for a comprehensive, editable resource to teach your students or child how to calculate compound interest? This set of lesson notes, extra practice (homework) worksheet, and exit ticket to check understanding of the lesson is excellent in helping students achieve mastery of this objective.

Students will begin with a teacher-guided example walking them though how to calculate compound interest semiannually (the same formula works for annually/monthly/daily/etc. compound interest) side-by-side interest being compounded continuously in the same scenario. Students are then provided a bunch of independent practice problems to practice creating and then using formulas to calculate compound interest given in different word problems.

The extra practice (homework) mimics the notes in style and content, providing students more independent practice problems, including some end-of-year test style questions. An optional last page of spiral review is included where students need to decide if a given situation is linear or exponential before creating the appropriate function to represent the scenario.

Objective(s):

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to use two different formulas to calculate compound interest both annually/semiannually/monthly/daily and compounded continuously.

What's Included:

• Notes: 3 pages + answer key
• Extra Practice: 3 pages + answer key
• Exit Ticket: Two identical exit tickets are included (this is meant to be cut into half to save paper) + answer key

Editable Format:

• As a google doc, all text is editable.

Random Tidbits:

• The inclusion of spiral review questions is something I am extremely passionate about because it emphasizes long-term learning over short-term memorization; it aims to continually keep previously taught content fresh in students' minds. Plus, in spiral review a slew of different content is mixed amongst the questions, requiring students to practice deciding what skill is needed on a problem before solving it, which they often don't need to do when practicing skills in the isolation of a lesson. Furthermore, it makes test/final exam/state test/ACT preparation much easier in the future. I noticed huge gains in students' scores and confidence when I included spiral review throughout my lessons.
• One of the things that I thought to do on each exit ticket that is super simple, but paid off huge dividends relationally with my students, is adding a sentence stem along with asking for their names. 1) Students almost never forgot to write their names on the exit ticket. 2) Daily, students would leave chatting with each other about what they wrote to answer the sentence stem. 3) It gave me something personal to chat with students about the next day as they entered class or I passed back exit tickets and helped me get to know them. 4) Even if students struggled on the exit ticket, I noticed that they never seemed to leave class feeling down or defeated because they could always at least answer the prompt about themselves.