Day 7

Slightly shorter class period today (53 minutes) because it's an advisory day.

We'll start with an opener called Sloping Letters, which helps them review the idea of positive, negative, zero and undefined slope.

 

We will then go over a homework screencast and talk about their first assessment tomorrow. This assessment will be over Graphing Stories and will ask them to put together what they know about verbal descriptions, tables of values, linear equations with domain restrictions, and Desmos. I'll explain to them my assessment philosophy and how I will give them an adequate amount of time for the assessment, but not unlimited (therefore they should be prepared). The actual assessment will include a link to a Desmos graph (or possibly Activity Builder, haven't constructed it yet). Right now (may change after I construct it), they will complete the problem, then take a screenshot and upload that to formative. I anticipate giving them about 10 minutes for the problem, but we'll see.

Today's lesson will be a combination of Polygraph Lines and my version of Des-Person/Winking Man Part 1 (part 1 because I'm hoping to create a part 2 and maybe 3 after we do quadratics later in the year). I'm hoping this will be a fun way to reinforce what we've done, including having them focus on some vocabulary (slope, intercept, quadrants, etc.) as well as domain restrictions.

Their homework will be to prepare for the assessment tomorrow (so no screencast), as well as their own Des-Person assignment that will be due on Friday (if I'm on track, today is Tuesday, assessment will be tomorrow on Wednesday, we don't have class on Thursday).

Day 6

Today we revisit Graphing Stories and the MARS task Interpreting Distance-Time Graphs, but this time we will write linear equations for all the stories that have all linear components - even if they are piecewise.

The opener will review how to find the y-intercept when you aren't given it but, instead, are given the slope and a point, or more often two points and you have to calculate the slope first.

We will then discuss one of the student's homework screencasts from the previous class.

Today's lesson will work through the Activity Builder Graphing Stories Part 2. This will solidify our ability to connect descriptions, tables of values and graphs, and then to be able to write equations for those graphs (including domain restrictions for piecewise functions). As part of this we will need to utilize solving for the y-intercept since we won't always have that for the different pieces of our graph.

For homework they will complete one more graphing story and record a screencast with their thinking. The hope is that by the end of this lesson they are feeling very comfortable with everything related to graphing stories, including writing equations for linear data.

Day 5

Today I hope to to cement the connection between a situation, a table of values, the graph, and the equation. The will also begin to connect slope more explicitly with the idea of rate of change and specifically with speed for distance-time graphs.

We'll begin with an opener that reviews slope and connects it to rate of change and speed (screenshots below).

We'll then complete an activity that requires gathering some data on three people walking, entering it into an Activity Builder, then using the data to try to come up with equations to describe their motion. The first walker will start at 0 and walk at an even pace for 10 seconds. The second walker will start at 3 feet (for example) and walk at a steady pace (hopefully slightly different pace than the first walker, we'll see). The third walker will walk a piecewise graph. Starting at 2 feet (for example), walking at a steady rate for 4 seconds, standing still for 3, then walking at a steady rate back toward the starting point for 3 seconds.

The hope is that they will not only connect the actual walk to the data tables and the graph, but they'll get a better idea of how speed relates to the graph and the idea of a domain restriction and piecewise equations. In our next class we will then revisit Graphing Stories and the MARS activity, coming up with equations for any of the linear graphs (including the piecewise ones).

For homework students will take a piecewise table of values, graph it on Desmos and come up with equations, domain restrictions, and a verbal description of what may have happened, then record a short screencast of their thinking.