Tuesday, October 30, 2012

More of the same - for a good reason

I'm loving the matching activities I've recently done in class, and my students aren't complaining, either.
So here's another one, on trig functions and graphs. Here it is again, as an editable word document. The last page, with amplitude, period and principal axis, is intentionally left blank so that students can write them down themselves. This is because we had already worked with this terminology the previous class.



If you haven't tried these activities before, then DO. In my classes, these are killer at getting students to think in constructive ways about mathematics, connect representations, develop concept understanding and enjoy math more than they'd ever done before.

For best effect: follow up with a mini-whiteboard/large paper activity in which students create their own graphs from given, or student made, function equations which have changes in several coefficients at the same time.