I had my students look at all four graphs and silently come up with one graph that doesn't belong with the other three, and WHY they feel that way. When they had their graph, they were supposed to give me a thumbs-up. Then I asked for students to volunteer their choice and explanation.
Quadratics is a review from Math 2 so I picked a group of graphs that were all parabolas. I really hoped some of my students would recognize the key features that they studied last year.
In each of my classes, all four choices were picked by someone, and really good "Math Words" were used in the explanations! I heard x- and y- intercepts, vertex, axis of symmetry, quadrants, and one student remembered that an upside-down parabola meant that the function had a negative x^2 term. YAY!!
The only bad thing ... the fourth graph doesn't have arrows on the ends of the parabola, and my students focused more on that then on something else. I let that explanation go, but also asked for another reason from the rest of the class. Note to self: look for little things like that in the next one!
After the wonderful discussion to start off the class, relative minimum/maximum and increasing/decreasing intervals went a bit smoother, and the kiddos didn't freak out too bad when I had them find key features of some craaaazzzy graphs.
On a different note, I missed another day of blogging! I still figure I'm doing pretty well with 4 days a week.
Have a good weekend all!
> ^..^ <
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