Monday, March 17, 2014

Lesson Planning Rational Functions

I participated tonight in the @alg2chat!  I often have plans to participate but too often get caught up in evening activities.  I'm glad I took the time tonight to visit ... definitely will do so next week as well!

In our chat teachers mentioned having just completed the Rationals unit and students having difficulty with it.  Since we begin Rational Functions on Friday, I was all ears!  It's been several years since I taught Algebra 2 so every unit is a new adventure for me.

I know as we get into solving rational equations that students will struggle with the algebraic manipulation.  We have a couple of weeks before we get to that part.  As if our custom with each parent function we start first with the graph ...

As the discussion progressed, Jen Silverman shared a couple of activities from a precalculus class.  One of them caught my eye.  The document was a discussion starter.  It had several graphs and equations with this question: Make as many connections between the equation and the graph as you can.

That was just the kind of open ended question I've been looking for as a way to start the thought process about rational functions.  The equations on her document were more difficult than the ones we will study.  So I simplified ... and scaled down to just one graph, one question, one discussion.

Here is my copy of the activity.

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