Tuesday 19 May 2015

MFM2P - Day 67: Trig Matching

It seems like a long time since we have done an Estimation 180. This is today's:



And here are their estimates:


As you can see a few students changed their estimates along the way (I love that they are thinking about it!). We discussed the factors involved (oops, I misspelled marshmallow) including the number of layers of marshmallows and the number of marshmallows per layer. We talked about the "melty" factor, too. This would be a fun one to actually do with a class.

When I corrected their cycle 3 tests I noticed that many students were still struggling with trigonometry and quadratics. So this week is going to be devoted to trig. Well, yesterday was a holiday and I lose my class to an assembly tomorrow, so that's only 3 days of trig. I made up a warm-up, matching activity and extension over the weekend - you can find them here. My inspiration was this post by Tina Palmer.

I handed out the warm-up and circulated to help them get going. Here is a snapshot of what they look like:


One of the reasons for the warm-up was to get my students to differentiate between similar triangle, trig and Pythagoream theorem questions. Some of them see a triangle and immediately do <choose one from above list> regardless of whether it makes sense. The warm-up really forced them to think about what information they were given and what they were being asked to find. Many were stuck on 2 of the 3 kinds of questions but got through them with a little help. A couple of students took the entire period to get through the sheet, mostly because they were getting distracted... The others all began the matching activity. For this one I made up 10 typical right angle trig word problems along with 10 skeleton diagrams and 10 answers. None, of course, were in the same order. My intent was to immediately stop any of them from reading a question and saying "I don't know what to do." I mean, they never get away with that, but this didn't even give them the option.



I wasn't sure if they would want to cut the pieces out but they all seemed happy to number the questions and match the numbers up on the diagrams page. They didn't get very far with this part today, but will continue next class.

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