Thursday, July 20, 2017

Solving Trig Equations part one revisited


I've already blogged about solving trig equations in a previous post found here. I've updated my lessons a bit by redoing the inserts for my ISN. This blog post shows the updated inserts. See the previous post for more details on the actual lesson.


inside that foldable:

Once again a review of some basic algebra skill is necessary and then they are applied to trig equation solving.




Students then work through a few practice examples:




All my equation solving foldables can be found HERE. You'll also see some worksheets of equation solving problems and answer keys.


Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Inverse Trig Functions Revisited


I'm updating my Inverse Trig Functions post because I updated my ISN pages in the 2016-2017 school year. I still like my introduction information found at this original blog post.

We still explore the various inverse trig functions using our graphing calculator (love the draw inverse option in the DRAW menu). From there we summarize our findings with three ISN pages for each of the big three trig functions. (I've veered away from doing as many foldables in my precalculus ISN - we have lots of room so don't need to conserve space with folding inserts).




From there the discussion heads towards how to evaluate inverse trig functions. The key word here is "functions". So we have to look at the domain & range restrictions of the inverse functions when determining what angle we have.

I have these two pages - the yellow is a flap over the white notebook page (hmmmm what did I just saw about not using foldables - but it makes sense to do it here). We do the white page first to consider and discuss how to do the evaluations in a general way with a few guided examples. Then students do the yellow page for independent/group practice as I circulate around the room.



From there we go into "double evaluations". I am able to get to all of this because we have an 82 minute block schedule. I usually start off by showing a few on the board so they can see what I mean by "double". I like to show at least one where the function and inverse "cancel" out  and one where they do not (see first two examples on white page 95 - something like those two). Because of the restrictions we cannot always assume that a function and its inverse will "cancel".

So after a bit of discussion we summarize how to "double evaluate" on this page with a few examples to do together.


At this point I usually do run out of time. So I assign a few problems in our textbook which mostly focus on the single evaluate. Then in our second class I use this insert as our warm up:

After discussing any questions students have on their homework (and maybe a basic homework quiz) they work in their small groups on a summary worksheet of many different inverse evaluations and double evaluations. You can find my worksheet in the files for this topic.

All files for inverse trig functions can be found HERE.