MFM2P - Day 9 2015

Today's warm up took rather a long time. We started with this Would You Rather:

but many groups said that the answer was obvious (and could explain why) so I changed the question to "Would you rather be given 119 g of Canadian dimes or 542 g of Canadian nickels?"

They worked in groups on the big whiteboards. Here are some of their solutions:

Each group presented their work. Some had different masses for nickels and dimes, but the process was correct. There were several students that wanted to multiply the mass of coins by the mass of each coin... I asked them how many candies they would have if they had 100 g in candy and each one weighed 10g. They said 10 and were able to tell me that they had divided (lightbulb went on) to get it. We talked about giving meaning to the numbers they were writing down as part of their solution. The third whiteboard picture above was actually written by me. One student was working alone so I worked through it with him so that I could show the class what I would like to see in terms of their written solution as we move forward. I should note that there were some good arguments in favour of both dimes and nickels.

Next we went back to the quadratic scenarios from yesterday. We finished the first one and worked on the second one, but will need more time on Tuesday to finish up (tomorrow is a PD Day and Monday is Family Day). My students seem to be understanding where the axis of symmetry is and why it is helpful for finding additional points.

After we finish this we will do some more work with linear and quadratic data before having a quiz. Then we move on to similar triangles and trig.