Grade Eleven Learning Activities

This week in Math Education class we were presented with learning activities for Grade Eleven math classes. We were presented with activities for both the University (U) and the Mixed (M) stream.

Stafanie was the first to present and her learning activity was focused on Grade Eleven M course, Functions and Applications. Her activity focused on the consolidation portion of the lesson and required students to make review booklets based on Exponential Functions.The booklets were labeled with five different sub-headings and under each heading students would write down key points and concepts. I really enjoyed this idea and felt that I could use it in my future classroom by making it my own. If I was to use this idea in my classroom, I would have each student complete a booklet after each unit. These booklets could even be put onto a piece of paper four at a time and placed in the front of binders. They would be a great asset to students who may struggle with studying or creating good study material. These would also be a great tool to use when students are completing review questions because they can't see any of the answers while they are working, they are forced to think about what the concept is.

The second presenter was Gordon who taught us about constructing triangles. The course he focused on was Grade Eleven U, Functions. Something that I took away from his presentation was the triangle tool pictured to the left. What I really enjoyed about this tool was that I could use it to visualize the ambiguous case for students. This particular tool was made to show the Side-Side-Angle (SSA) relationship. If given two sides and one angle, a student should be able to construct one, two or no triangles.When I taught Grade Eleven Functions at my placement in December, this was a concept that students really struggled with. Even I found myself struggling to wrap my head around this concept. But after seeing this tool in action, I am confident that it would have helped my Grade Elevens understand this concept so much better. By being able to manipulate the triangle and see the yellow arm move to form the two different triangles students are given a visual representation. This is very important because a lot of students have a hard time when it comes to visualizing problems in trigonometry.

Lastly, Laura presented a great way to introduce exponential functions to Grade Eleven U students. She set up three stations around the room and split us up into groups. As groups we rotated around the room to complete each station. The first station was a Zombie Apocalypse which involved a hoard of zombies infecting the city. The second station was the Ice Bucket Challenge and the third station involved folding a sheet of paper. All of these stations modeled exponential functions. We each received a worksheet that had a table of values to record the data and a graph. I think this was a great activity to get students thinking about exponential functions and what they look like. I also enjoyed how the end of the worksheet contained questions about first and second differences, showing that these functions were neither linear nor quadratic.

I look forward to next week when we dive into Grade Twelve Mathematics.