2015-2016 Day 3

Geometry started today by going over the worksheets from last week (Tower Task and Patchwork).  This went swimmingly.  The kids were able to set up the equations much more easily after seeing the blocks rearranged into rectangles rather than in the stacked form.  We followed a similar process with the squares in the Patchwork problem.  The whole point of these worksheets was to get the students used to thinking outside of their traditional methods.  We then took our first set of notes for the year - basically review of things the kids already knew.  Points, lines, segments, rays, etc were the topics of the day.

Pre-Calculus finished up their summer packet review.  I love this set of worksheets and the insight they have given me into what the kids already know.  I am a little concerned about the lack of comfort they have with graphs of parent functions.  At this point, they are only comfortable with graphing a line, a quadratic, and a cubic function.  They are far less comfortable with square and cubic root functions, absolute value functions, exponential and logarithmic functions, sine and cosine...  These are the parent functions of my course.  I fear what will not be covered in class due to the time we'll spend on these topics.  Later this week, the students are completing a placemat activity on solving various types of equations, including two-step equations, quadratics requiring factoring or the quadratic formula, cubic and quartic equations, absolute value equations, square roots equations, etc.  I expect the kids will do well with these.  The first few days of school have already taught me SO much about what skills these kids are lacking and the areas in which they have a firm foundation.  My next step is to create some lessons and activities focused on domain, range, increasing/decreasing/constant intervals, etc.  Not quite sure what I'm dong there yet.  (Suggestions gladly accepted.)

On a more productive note, the other geometry teacher and myself completed our list of chapter projects and their corresponding rubrics.  Geometry students are required to complete one project per unit.  We basically went with what I had mentioned in this post, but eliminated option 6.  We decided the openness of that option would be too difficult to grade/create a rubric.