Find slope in four ways

Each day, students complete a warm-up that usually consists of spiraling the previous day's material, in addition to older material.  Warm-up problems also sometimes extend lessons that students have encountered before to more unfamiliar contexts.

For a video narrative about how I structure each lesson, and how the warm-up fits in, click Warm UP.

Today's warm-up is a bit different, in that it reviews, verbatim, the big ideas from the previous day.  I review these by putting a linear function on the board, say, y = 3x - 1.

Here is a series of questions I might ask about this:

- Where does this line cross the y-axis?

- Is it sloping upward or downward?  How do you know?

- If I changed the slope to 2, would the line become more or less steep?  How do you know?

- If I changed the slope to -3, what would happen?

- How could I get this line to pass through the origin?

- How could I move this line "up" without changing its slope?

- etc.

These push their understanding of the structure of the equation, and how it would change.

The homework file is a resource that generally includes 5-7 problems, some of which are related to the day's lesson, as well as spiraled review of previous lessons.  I also give the kids the answers to all the problems. 

Sometimes, the HW file is a take-home assessment.