MFM2P - Day 7 2015 (Quadratics...)

I am currently at the board office a little early for our lesson study meeting. I am very happy to be part of this lesson study group. I have a draft blog post about it that I really need to get back to...soon.

In class my students should now know Mrs. Stadel's height and be learning some more about quadratics. They will be working through this sheet that they glued in their exercise books yesterday.

I know that many will have a lot of trouble filling in the table of values. I'm hoping that giving them the scenario in words will help them connect the different representations.

Once they have worked through that example, they will do these ones. Again, the contexts are nothing very interesting, but I have tried to set students up for success in terms of connecting words to points (with the correct vocabulary) and to the corresponding graph. We do not go into any depth when it comes to quadratics in MFM2P, so using the axis of symmetry becomes an important tool for finding additional points on the parabola. I also want to address one of the biggest challenges for my students which is finding the y-coordinate of the vertex given the zeros. They don't seem to be making the connection between what they know on the graph and the fact that the equation represents all points on the graph and can be used to find missing information. I have not pushed this much early in the semester before, but I think I need to start emphasizing that link in order to ensure that they "get it" by the end of the course.

Tomorrow's post will fill you in on how things went today in my absence!