The Friday Five smells Back to School sales and events on the horizon. It
hopes to get your creative juices flowing for the coming school year by
offering up a diverse collection of resources. Enjoy.
Sketchy Fractions
This activity challenges students to expand their horizons for fraction area models. Sure, it starts with half a square, but then it’s on to a different way to do that, and pretty soon students are creatively partitioning an equilateral triangle in fourths.
Find the SOAP
Paul Jorgens—who brought us Parabola Slalom a few weeks back—offers up more conic goodness by having students identify sets of points under constraints. Circles, parabolas, lines…these are Sets Of All Points (SOAP) that follow rules. Projector mode in the interactive graphs makes this activity a visual as well as mathematical delight.
Predicting Movie Ticket Prices
This activity does exponential modeling with a twist. What accounts for breaks in the pattern of increasing movie ticket prices? This activity is part of the exponentials bundle, which is also worth the price of admission.
Zeroes of Polynomial Functions
A structured series of challenges moves students familiar with factored forms of quadratic functions to generalizing similar ideas about cubics, quartics, and quintics. Good times!
A Walking Machine
The fifth object in this week’s Friday Five isn’t an activity but a graph. Suzanne Von Oy is one of many users who regularly make beautiful things on the calculator. We learn a lot from these folks. You and your students can, too.