Days 56, 57 & 58

Day 56

Daily repeated practice of multiplying polynomials seems to be paying off. They will take a break for a couple of days as I will be away. It will be interesting to see how they fare on Monday.

We then went back to our systems of equations. Following up from yesterday, we did this question:

It didn't take long for a student to say that we needed one of the quantities to be the same so we could double the first order. Then they reasoned through finding the price of one latte and the price of one cookie.

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Here is the next example:

And our solution:

I love how well they can reason through these problems. I cannot believe that I have been teaching for as long as I have without teaching "solving by elimination" this way. Live and learn...  Thank you again to Sheri Walker for these brilliant examples.

We then went back to yesterday's question and replaced the words with variables so that they saw how to solve it algebraically by elimination. Some were ready for that, some wanted no part of it. I told them that they need to be able to solve these systems, whether that is with words, pictures or algebra.

For the last 15 minutes, we watched Andrew Stadel's basketball 3-act and they attempted to solve it. Without much success. But we will work on that some more next week.

Days 57 & 58

I will be at the OAME (Ontario Association for Mathematics Education) annual conference in Toronto. My students will be working in randomly chosen pairs on a poster project involving sums of squares (Pythagorean theorem), similar triangles and trigonometry. I expect great things when I return on Monday!