Grades 6-9;
32 activities - 232 pages;
Drawn from physical and life sciences, business, geometry, and other real-world phenomena, the tasks in Looking at Lines have students experience important algebraic concepts in their natural setting. Hands-on involvement heightens students' interest and deepens understanding.
Algebraic thinking involved in finding the rule for patterns discovered in real-world contexts, graphing the coordinate plane, and distinguishing between proportional and non-proportional relationships, is within the grasp of students at grades 6-9.
Three sub-groups of linear functions are studied: proportional relationships, non-proportional relationships with a positive slope, and non-proportional relationships with negative slopes.
Using these tasks, students will learn to:
- derive data from real-world situations
- graph data on the coordinate plane
- write a rule for a set of (input, output) ordered pairs
- wite a rule for the graph of a line
- relate each aspect of a rule to its real-world counterpart, the data tables, and the graph of a line
- use a rule to generate ordered pairs
- transalte a rule into a graph using ordered pairs