Students at our school spend a lot more time dissecting parent functions in Algebra 2 and PreCalculus. But it's worthwhile to acknowledge now (in Algebra 1) that there is a whole treasure-trove of functions out there to play around with. My students look at seven different functions in our unit 3 (functions) primarily to get a sense of what's out there and to see what linear vs non-linear means/looks like. Then we move on to unit 4 and spend lots of time with linear functions. (while we are in that unit we also touch upon piece-wise and absolute value functions). Later in the year we work with exponential, logistic and quadratic functions.
Step One
Students work in their groups doing a little exploring on their graphing calculators with this instruction sheet. They get to practice describing domain & range with interval notation.
Step Two
We summarize what they found with our ISN pages. These are a double page spread without a separate "right page reflect" for each (there are examples embedded here in the "learning"). Recall from earlier blog entry that I usually don't use my ISN pages for initial "learning" - they are often for summarizing after students explore. This is an example of that. All ISN documents are linked in headings below.Linear Functions
Non-linear Functions (sorry the first image is blurry...)
and some additional ideas I gathered from the internet for possible future use or to help others?
