Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Trig! (almost)

Pam Patterson just sent me a link on twitter that's AWESOME. It's a list of assignments (with linked activities) that a teacher named David Pleacher gives to his precalc classes (who just coincidentally are using the same book that I do!).  Heaven.  I actually have quite a few of the resources he uses, but it's always nice to find some new ones!

We talked about the unit circle today in precalc - it's nice to be able to bring together all of the "random" things we've been doing the past week (like radians/degrees/special right triangles). I always like the kids to know where the ordered pairs on the unit circle come from, so I hand out notecards, we draw the special triangles to fit in our unit circle, label the sides, and voila!  The ordered pairs.  There's always the awkward moments where the kids are trying to see through their notecard to find the 30 degree angle so that they can draw the triangle.  Today (after doing this twice already... and multiple times for the past 10+ years) I had a revelation.  WHY NOT USE PATTY PAPER?  We have a ton of it (so I'm not scrounging up note cards) and it's see-throughable.  I can't believe this wasn't obvious to me years ago.  I grabbed a box from the math department office and used it 5th period without a hitch.

My Algebra 1 class finished up Barbie Bungee today... and boy, them working with Barbies was quite different than my Algebra 2 class. They looooved it.  Barbie had quite a few more accidents, though - and that was just on our walk to get to the final bungee location!  Needless to say, they were quite excited about our "field trip" to the football field for the big drop.

Factoring today in Algebra 2!

What a big day it's been.


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