Today was some of my students' favourite class. Nothing to do with math, of course. My students got hot chocolate this morning. They were so well-behaved and patient waiting to get their cup ready - it was awesome. Some had mints which they added to make it more "sophisticated"! They politely asked for seconds and they very nicely said thank you. It was a good thing. And we did the Easter Estimation 180's while they drank it.
With a few groans we moved back to working on slope. I circulated helping them with the worksheet from yesterday. Many were getting the hang of finding the change in y and the change in x and some were finding the ratio correctly too. They needed a little help with the "special" slopes - those of horizontal and vertical lines. Hopefully emphasizing that a horizontal line is not steep at all helps make the right connection to a slope of 0. Some students had trouble finding the slope between two points (without a graph) but did pretty well once I pointed them to their comp books where we had done a couple of examples yesterday. Some issues that came up were getting the ratio the right way around and simplifying, but I did not see any student mixing up x-values and y-values (yay!). This work took a while but was worthwhile. We finished the day by looking at line graphs on Desmos. I entered y = mx + b and added sliders for m and b then moved them so the students could see the effect. Here is the ready-made example available in Desmos:
They may not have made all the connection I want them to yet, but this plants the seed for the work we will do on Tuesday.
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