Skip to main content

Key Features of Polynomials

 


After teaching for seventeen years, I have always found students struggle with domain, range, increasing and decreasing. I have also struggled trying to find different ways to teach the concept. Since math came easy to me, I just understood those concepts; however, students really struggle to see what I see. :) This year, my students are finally "getting" the concept of domain and range. For domain, I told the kids that there was a man walking the x-axis looking up and down. Where does he start to see the graph? Where does he stop seeing the graph as he is walking the x-axis? Same for range...a little guy is climbing up the y-axis looking left and right. Where does he start to see the graph? Where does he stop seeing the graph as he climbs? It isn't perfect, but I think the kids got it. As for increasing and decreasing...I told the kids to find the min and max first. Thank God for Desmos! :) I told them to label the x-value for min and max on their graphs. Then I treated it like a rollercoaster...when are you riding up the roller coaster? When do you start? When do you stop? When are you falling on the rollercoaster? When does that start? When does that stop? I think I finally got them to see! Yay! Only took me seventeen years. :)

So for practice, I gave them this Google Slides activity. They must type in their answers. It was great since we are hybrid right now! I used the Canvas Google LTI tool so each student received a copy. I really love using this external tool! 

The activity is below: 

Key Features of Functions

~RJ



Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 4, 2021 at 11:48 AM

    This is great! My students really struggle with this as well so I will definitely be using these explanations!! Thanks :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. girlmathx2February 11, 2021 at 5:31 PM

      Thanks! I hope you find success like I did! :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AP Calculus Hunger Games Review

I created this a couple of years ago when Hunger Games was really popular. However, I thought that I would share with all of you in case you wanted to use or revamp to something newer.  I created 12 groups for the 12 districts. They decided what their name would be as a district. They had tasks each day to accomplish. The tasks were just multiple choice questions centered around the major topics of Calculus AB. This took a lot longer than I thought - about 4 days. I was forced to give them more than 15 minutes for each task (which did not make me happy since the AP exam is timed - Oh well.) I had the time, and it worked out.  You can decide how you want to the points to work, I gave them 2 points for each correct answer. It was very easy to grade as this is the student worksheet. They placed the letter of the answer in each spot.  I made them show all work on another student sheet so that I could see what we needed to review.  Each day, I would post the new rankin
2 comments
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

Adding & Subtracting Rational Expressions Drag & Drop

Because Math 3 now has drag & drop on the final exam, students need the practice. So, I created one using Google Slides. It went over really well!  While this only took the students about 40-45 minutes to complete, it took me about 2 days to create this activity. Oh well, at least it is cute! :) I used Google Drawings to create the scene and took a screenshot of the drawing to post as the background in Google Slides. This worked so that students could only move the answers.  I created this for an Honors class and one of the problems (#5 - the one pictured) really stumped the kiddos. I loved it! They kept thinking that x - 1 was not part of the common denominator...they didn't realize that they needed to simplify after subtracting. It really made them think!   When they were finished, they shared it with me! I really think that this helped the kids get more practice on drag & drop while working on adding and subtracting rational expressions!  Here is the ac
9 comments
Read more