Welcome to a series of posts sharing how we #Desmosify the curriculum from Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics. You can use this lesson for free, or sign up to get many more activities just like it in our core middle school curriculum!

Here’s how we #Desmosified an Open Up Resources/IM lesson to help students learn to solve inequalities..

Desmosification #1: Create concrete connections.

In the original lesson we #Desmosified, Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics invites students to complete a series of exercises like the one below.

These exercises are likely to give students valuable experience with the subtleties of inequalities. The examples include inequalities that are strict and inclusive, inequalities that include negative and positive values, etc.

We worried, however, that students would spend too much time filling in tables to notice those subtleties. We also wanted to connect the solution of inequalities to a representation that’s more concrete for students than tables.

Enter Shira the Sheep!

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