Rate of Change & Slope

My Algebra One students learned about rate of change and slope last year in 8th grade. And they are an honors level class so I find they are quite good with this material, so this is mostly review.

We start with "rate of change" and we recall that a linear function has a constant rate of change. I use a graphic organizer to illustrate the many ways to consider what rate of change is on our "left learning page".

 On the "right reflect" we do some rate of change examples.

At this point I like to include a short little performance task called "Homecoming Balloons".

 Parts of it can be solved with an equation, but I want them to use rate of change so purposely do this before we review the different linear equations (they learned at least slope-intercept form last year in 8th grade). If you want the teacher "answer key" with rubric for scoring contact me and I'll email it to you.  

I have this "warm up" worksheet to wrap up "rate of change" the next class and lead us into slope of a line. 

Next we look more formally at slope. First we consider the 4 types of slope using the very popular slope dude youtube video. I've used this for years!  Well before we had our interactive student notebooks. 

and we support these ideas with an ISN page:

I added the letters WWSDS to this page (what would slope dude say) and have a large poster of these letters on both my front and back walls. Thank you Sarah Hagan of Math=Love for this great idea!

Students do a little "right hand reflect" on the bottom of this left hand page with some roller coaster slope examples:

And for additional practice, the real right hand page we do this "4 Types of Slope" foldable that I found via Mrs. Math at teachers-pay-teachers. This is a free downloadable. (my copy linked above includes any edits I made).

All of the previous material is essentially review for my students so moves rather quickly. Here is a nice "cool down" for students, it can be collected as an exit slip to see what students are thinking and how well they can explain. It just looks at using the formula. 

A great warm up on the second day is to do a slope treasure hunt. I'll have to do a blog entry going over this really cool "move around the room" activity that can be adapted to any math concept. But it's not too difficult to interpret and students have a lot of fun with it. 

And I love doing "You Be the Teacher" problems, where students examine worked through examples and explain what's wrong with them. Here is a worksheet of "you be the teacher slope formula". 

Then we do some additional examples involving slope as seen in this foldable. (sometimes I start with an investigation that the students work on in their groups). 

With a Right hand reflect page of examples that I use as a warm up the next class:

Or even assign those problems for homework.

There is a ton of material out there on the web on teaching slope, the above is just what I've pulled together for my class.