Guess Who & Polygraph Lines

As we come to the end of the semester review days are here. To help grade 9s review properties of linear relations we played Guess Who. Last September I ran Guess Who with my grade 12 Advanced Functions class with great success. I made up a new sheet for grade 9 with a variety of linear relations (graphs, equations, and tables).

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Guess Who game sheet

The students played a few rounds each! The questions coming out were pretty good! I overheard lots of “Does is show direct variation?”, “Does it have an initial value?”, “Is your graph decreasing?”
All great terminology I love hearing from my grade 9 applieds!!

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After a few rounds of “low tech” Guess Who, we broke out teacher.desmos.com and “high tech” Guess Who —– Polygraph – Lines

Students use a class code to access the game. Round 1 is playing the orginal guess who with pictures of people against the computer. 
The system then links you up randomly with another student in your class. You take turns each choosing a graph and asking questions to guess your opponents graph! 

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Again, great questions and discussions here! I could see the deep thinking about what questions to ask to eliminate options. Desmos once again out does it! Linking up digital resources while keeping learning social!

These students have been great to teach this semester! I’ll miss them next year!!

Function Matching – Down the Desmos Rabbit Hole!

Before our break I created a set of challenges for students to investigate translations of different functions. I had a few goals in mind:

  • Introduce a few basic functions that we will work with in this unit (square root, rational, cubic, quadratic).
  • See how certain points on the function are translated.
  • How does affecting the values in the equation affect the graph of a variety of functions?
  • Use function notation to represent translations.

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The Power of Match My Graph

I was checking out twitter last week and ran into this from Dan Meyer:

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) February 19, 2015

and I had a concept coming up that I have always had a tough reaction to. I threw it out there.

To get students to be interested in it I wanted them to be “dying” to figure it out.

I thought about putting them in a place where they had to struggle— I wanted to open up the middle!
Michael Fenton has a series of Match my Parabola challenges and I thought of those. I modified his challenges a bit to include those examples from my tweet.

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Click to access Desmos page

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Ready for round 2?

Second semester is starting tomorrow and I just wanted to get down my ideas on things I will be changing and things I will be keeping…..

New things…

I’ll be using the spreadsheet I modified from @alicekeeler. Although I plan on using Kyle Pearce’s further modified version.

I have slightly modified old my assessment approach (again). I’ll share later.

Kyle and I have been Tweeting back and forth all weekend about spiralling our grade 9 applied classes. We have been teaching using an inquiry based approach (4 part math lesson) and thought that spiralling would fit right in. We’ll keep you posted. Here is my day-to-day plan by topic and task, so far .

I’ll Continue….

a ton of stuff….but here are a few

Keeping my students curious.

Strengthening the connection between algebraic representations and graphical representations using Desmos! 

Documenting my class by taking a picture/tweet for every school day.

Warm ups – To start every class we do a warm up / starter. Most of these starters are math related but for me the most important part is that the starters allow our class to “Gel”. My buddy @Regan_bio is an advocate for always saying we should show our students that we are human and remember they are human too. Take the first 5 minutes of class and be a good human with your kids…..maybe they will be more ready to do some math!

Recently Mary Bourassa has shared her great list of daily warm ups for her grade 10 applied class. Check out her warm ups.

Here’s what we have been doing…

Monday’sEstimation180 – As a class we complete one of these great challenges (10 minutes). We track our progress on Andrew’s / Michael Fenton’s provided handout.

Tuesday’s – Visual Patterns. I choose a pattern for us to determine the equation.

Wednesday’s – Pictionary – Our class is split into two teams. They take turns drawing and guessing objects, sayings, math ideas that I have picked out. Most of the time this is a non math game. (10 minutes)

Thursday’s – Throw Back Thursday — I choose a question / skill that my class has been exposed to in the past and we work on our whiteboards on this as a review question.

Friday’s – 20 Questions. — I pick something and the class has 20 yes or no questions to try and guess what I have picked. We then play a second round where the class together picks something and I try to guess. (10 minutes).

Have an exciting second semester everybody!