Find slope in four ways
Objective: SWBAT determine the slope of linear functions in 4 ways.
Big Idea: The slope only has 4 hiding places... figure out which strategy to use when. Bring it all together... consolidate finding slope from a graph, from a table, from points, and from an equation.
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Warm-up
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.
Homework
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.
