More Distance Functions

I will give my students Piecewise and Absolute Value Functions Warm-up at the start of class today. 

The big idea behind the focus on making piecewise functions continuous is that at certain inputs, we need the outputs of the different parts of the function to match up with each other. In today's lesson I want students to work on developing purely algebraic methods to solve these problems (MP1, MP2). In order to support this goal, I will encourage students to use graphing technology to check their answers. In this instance, using technology also helps to reinforce the idea that we can represent the same things either graphically or algebraically (MP5). As the students develop their own methods, I will keep referring students back to the big idea I will give the students 20 minutes or so to look at these problems before encouraging them to move on to the next section.

Today's investigation is really set up to allow students more time to investigate the big ideas of the previous days, with an additional task available for students who have already mastered the other tasks.

I start off a workshop session like this by making sure that each student has clear expectations--for some students, this will be continuing to work on the Level A problems from the Exploring Distance Functions Assessment. For other students, this might be trying a more challenging level of this assessment. Still for others, it will be to investigate these new problems in the Challenging Absolute Value Equations.

Once each student is clear on their expectations, have everyone get started and circulate to make sure that each student is engaged in their task. I often make changes to what I want students to accomplish throughout the class period based on what I see--I identify some students who should be working on a more challenging level, or other students who should focus on some easier problems.