Trig Functions: Desmos

As always, I was able to knock this lesson out of the park... thanks to Desmos! It is so easy to check the students' progress through the teacher dashboard. And if you want, you can project this screen so that students can see if they are correct with their card sorts. What was my teaching life like before Desmos? Not like this!

Because I do so many activities in class, my students have gotten in the habit of asking, "What are we going to do today?". And not in the annoying teenage/eye-roll fashion, but in the I'm pretty excited about coming to math class fashion. But they weren't always this way. Trust me, I begin on day 1 doing some sort of an activity in all of my classes. I want them to know that I expect all students to be engaged 100% during class time. Unfortunately, most of my learners did not get this excitement (that's what I'm calling it anyway) in their previous math classes.

Back to today... my Desmos activity. I created this based solely on graphing trig functions with a unit circle review tucked in at the end. The trig functions do not have phase shift included- that is saved for Math 4, but include amplitude, period, and vertical shift.

The students had a great time completing this task! I had them paired up, but they were not limited to discussion with only their partner. Students could help peers in other groups; and they did. It was amazing to watch the community of learners have rich conversations about math 😊

If you are interested in trying this Desmos activity in your classroom, feel free to click here.

I hope your students have as much fun as mine did!

~SSB

Comments

Limit Project

Well...we just got back into school after being out for almost 3 weeks because of hurricane Florence. Our school is okay, but there are many people out there suffering from losing so much. :( I had planned on a project for Calculus before the storm but will have to put that aside until next year! We have just lost too much time. However, I wanted to still share the project with you guys in case you would like to try it or something similar to it. I like to make projects a unique experience. I hate when all students do the same thing. #1 - students can and WILL copy. #2 - It's boring to grade! The idea of this project is floating somewhere on the web. I honestly can't remember where I got the idea. But I have altered it over the years to meet the needs of my students. It has gone through many alterations, and I will continue to change things. So it is not perfect! The gist - students find a recipe that has at least 5 ingredients. (The recipe ...

Arithmetic & Geometric Recursive Investigation

Investigation and student accountability is extremely important in education today. Students need to be challenged! They will learn so much more by discovering the formulas rather than me just placing the formula on the board! While talking to my intern about not finding anything cool dealing with recursive sequences, I got an idea. I wanted my kids to find a pattern and develop the arithmetic and geometric recursive formulas using the information that they already know. I created a cut and paste activity where students had to match the sequence, the type, the common difference/ratio, the explicit formula, and the recursive formula. From that, I hoped that students would be able to see a pattern! On a note card, I had them answer three questions...describe any patterns that you see, write a general recursive arithmetic formula, and write a general recursive geometric formula. The students did an awesome job until they were asked to produce the general rec...

Exponential Growth & Decay Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger Hunts are always fun (and easy to grade). This particular one is all about applications of exponential growth & decay. My students seem to understand this topic really well, but I still wanted to provide more practice. When I did this hunt originally, I created the cards with the answer on the front and the question on the back. Once I figured out how to copy and make it work, it was great because I could use the cards over and over again. However, they started looking old, and I lost some of the cards. So t his year, I placed the answer and question on the front. It made it so much easier to copy! If you would like to try this in your class, here is a copy ! I included the solutions as well. UPDATE: I created this activity and transformed into a remote version. Remote Version: SE Scavenger Hunt TE Scavenger Hunt ~RJ

Girl Math

Search This Blog