Line Week - Day 4

Day 4 of  Line Week; today we practiced identifying slope and intercept from graphs!  First a side note, I usually test each Friday - I consider this to have a couple of benefits - one it allows me to pull lots of review problems all year long not allowing any topic to lose mastery (cause if you don't use it you'll lose it), two it gives me needed chair time.  When I teach I am up with the class, their doing, I am guiding, discussing, sometimes showing; Friday tests allow me to plan, grade and handle whatever is pressing (today it was ordering MS math team t-shirts). 

So I broke with tradition a little and shortened Algebra's test so we could work on identifying slope and y-intercept as a class.  We plotted a few lines, discussed slope and reinforced the last few days (then a "half-test").  Day 5 is Monday - wrap up day -- I like that it will happen after a weekend, it lets us review and discuss the concepts again.

The project over the next week is create two real world problems and graphs, one representing a positive slope situation and one with a negative slope.  I would expect problems like "John had $20 in his wallet and did Frankie's paper route for $5 per day, how much money does John have after five days?"  with a graph. It is a start (also all my projects are done until correct - so if it takes multiple revisions cause a student does have understanding they will work at it til they get an acceptable "product"  - like a workplace).    The real challenge is to take the next step, perhaps Line week 2, where we take data and decide if it is linear (something to add to Geometry?).  

So not a bad week, next week we will practice and I will assign "line homework" next week.  I never assign homework of the concept we are learning -- homework is practice of "known" things.  So even during "Line Week" we did not graph lines outside of class.  They practiced factoring....

Til Day 5.....