Friday, March 11, 2011

The end of days...

I hate to say it, but we've come to the time of year that I dislike the most.... the end of trig in precalc.  Actually, I'm normally ready to be done with it (all good things must come to an end) but I've been happy with how most of my kids have done this year.  (We'll leave out the girl who started crying today as soon as she saw the quiz.)

Just a couple of things left to cover - Law of Sines, Law of Cosines, and the area of oblique triangles.  I have a packet of problems that I give the kids (my favorite assignment of the year, I admit...I blogged about it last year!) a couple of days to work on.  This year will be a little more challenging for them because we have our state testing next week and our classes are only 30 minutes long each day.  Guess that means they'll need to work more outside of class!

Anyway, Mimi over at I Hope This Old Train Breaks Down found my problems and gave them to her Honors Geo kids to work through.  (I'm impressed - makes my precalc kids look like dummies! :)  )  She also blogged about having them draw an irregular quadrilateral on a piece of paper, measuring a few sides, and having them find the area.  The past few years I've done a little activity where we watch a clip from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and then done a worksheet finding different values from the podracing scene (got it here from Mathbits.com).  I think I'll try the paper thing instead this year!

Thanks, Mimi!

1 comment:

untilnextstop said...

Sure thing - let me know if you like it!! The 9th-grade honors kids are good at algebra, but not as good at using their intuition. Not sure if it's a reflection of my own teaching! :(

Thanks again for your trig problems. :)