Relations

Relations - what's that? Another abstract concept that gets students ready for the idea of functions. You can start this off with a conversation by just writing "relationship" on the board and ask students what it means and then what it might mean in algebra.

The Lesson

I use a PowerPoint to guide the conversation and illustrate an example. Here is the notes sheet we use for this. Unfortunately we are quite limited in our technology in our school so I don't have a smart board to use. We used to have "walk-and-talk" boards from ten years ago but they didn't keep up with technology like the Smart ones did and went out of business. I know I could have much more dynamic lessons with my LCD projection with Smart boards but oh well.

I'm thinking for this coming year I want to use the words "domain" and "range" now interchangeably with "input" and "output". I have started using them just a lesson or two later when dealing with functions but there is no reason not to start using them as soon as we start talking about relations. So many details to keep track of and incorporate when lesson planning! Seems obvious when stepping back but I'm always adjusting and modifying as I teach (and reflecting afterwards and then doing more modifying).

Interactive Notebook

We summarize the concepts in our ISN with a frayer diagram (see previous blog post from July 9 for templates) and a 6 door french door foldable for ways to represent a relation/function. I don't have a right hand reflect here but the french door foldable does that with an example on money you make in your job. I write that example down on the board for the students to use.

I would prefer the "sentence" to use "is a function of" rather than "depends on". That's the main change I will undertake this coming year. Here's the foldable template for printing.

Other Resources

Then I've got a classwork sheet and a homework sheet that I've used in this lesson.

Overall not a fancy lesson, but sets the stage with some tools for illustrating and talking about functions.