The Friday Five is enjoying the cool breeze off of Lake Superior in Duluth, MN
this week at the Minnesota state math teacher conference. If you’re here too
say, “Hi!” Correspondingly, here are five cool activities for you and your
students.
Polygraph: Scatter Plots
Stats teachers! If you thought the fun of Polygraph was reserved exclusively for geometry and algebra teachers, well Megan Schmidt is here to change your mind. Listen closely while your students play—whether they know the words yet or not, they’re asking about important properties of scatter plots.
Exploring Parabolas
Melissa Palmer brings us this short, to the point series of transformations screens. Sliders plus recording the equation, plus a quick “how did you know what to do?” Simple is good.
Radical Transformations
Paul Jorgens has put together a very similar sort of thing with square root functions, and gives you the opportunity to introduce the delightful term semiparabola to your algebra students.
Domain and Range Exploration
Let’s say your students rocked Marbleslides last week, and you want to keep their knowledge of domain and range restrictions razor sharp. What can you do? Elizabeth Lehtola offers up this activity to help you out.
Slope: Formative Assessment
The title says it all. If you want to know what your students know about slope of a line, then Michael Fenton has this handy tool for you. Have your students work through it, give the teacher dashboard a skim, and then get on with the business of planning your next instructional moves.