Semester 2 Day 1 First Minutes Count

I had the opportunity to host the #ClassKickChat tonight on Twitter.  I had fun interacting with colleagues ... great ideas shared.  Our focus was on the first and last minutes of class.  Some days I do pretty well with the first few minutes.  Way too often I am in too big of a rush in the last few minutes of class.

Today was our first day back!  We needed to dust the holiday glitter from our brains -  remembering previous lessons on polynomials ... and add just a bit more to that topic - focusing on graphing and specifically the behavior of functions at the x-axis.  We call this lesson the "cross, bounce, wiggle" lesson!

To get started I used roller coasters as the hook.  I showed them this picture and asked ... would you want to ride this coaster?  Why or why not?

Next we went to a site (now closed) to create and ride coasters!  Students used the x-intercepts to write factors, multiply them, to find the coaster that worked in the first 2 examples.  And then they created their own fun coaster in the third interactivity.  This took about 15 minutes - a little long for an introduction but we had time to re-visit some key concepts and also catch up with one another in the process.

Students were ready for the main meal ... the entree of the day!

PS We don't have a subscription to that Kinetic Books website but I'm very curious about it.  The only activity I have used from it is the roller coaster.  I'm wondering if there are other accessible interactivities?