www.cs.utah.edu

Helping students make connections to their prior math knowledge is an invaluable tool for stimulating exploration and enhancing retention, therefore, this unit plan will link right triangle trigonometry to the Unit Circle and then we will “unwrap” the Unit Circle in the Graphing Trig Functions unit plan to get the graphs of the sine and cosine functions.

Let’s begin with right triangle trigonometry. I would advise doing a mini lesson to review right triangle trigonometry. In Georgia most students are exposed to right triangle trigonometry in the tenth grade so a 1-2 day refresher should be all that is needed before proceeding to the unit circle. Discovery Education is a great resource for videos because most of the videos have supplementary materials for students to do. I am an avid Promethean board user so I highly recommend looking at Promethean Planet for resources as well.

Here is a link to a short Discovery Education video on right triangle trigonometry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAMLZHA-esQ&feature=youtu.be

I have also attached a nice little animation on trigonometry that could be used as an opening or closing activity.

http://goanimate.com/videos/0IkUvqBupcEg

After the right triangle trigonometry refresher I would recommend spending 1-2 days on covering standard position, co-terminal and reference angles. Here is a short Discovery Education video on angle measures.

http://www.youtube.com/edit?ns=1&feature=vm-privacy&video_id=Xv5S-kLb1qk

Intro to trig STUDENT document

Intro to trig TEACHER document

http://zoinx.tripod.com/mathcomics/

Once students are comfortable with finding the co-terminal and reference angles its time to introduce the unit circle. I have my students construct a Unit Circle and then teach them how to convert from degrees to radians and vice versus. Whether you teach students how to convert first and then construct the Unit Circle doesn’t matter. It’s really just a matter of personal preference. Here is a quick animation I created on converting from degrees to radians and vice versa.

http://goanimate.com/videos/0XVMSkt6xsIs/1

Right Triangles on the Unit Circle (student, teacher)

I’m not above using cheap gimmicks to grab my students’ attention and bribe them into doing work so I have attached a video clip for Alice and Wonderland’s Follow the White Rabbit and an activity called Follow the White Rabbit. This activity assesses students’ knowledge of co-terminal angles, reference angles, and radian-degree conversion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_fsXIoGUn4 - White Rabbit

Follow the White Rabbit sheet

I also like for my students to have the Unit Circle memorized because it makes graphing the trig functions and solving trig identities easier. I give a quick (5 question) quiz on each of the quadrants at the beginning of class for 4 consecutive days. The quiz includes questions that can be about the degrees, radians, coordinates, sine or cosine. Students don’t know what the questions will be so they are motivated to learn everything in each quadrant. I encourage them to look for the patterns and use their know of reference angles and the special right triangles to assist them. Here is a cool 1^st quadrant of the Unit Circle video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player _embedded&v=OBmhgiLi77k - Unit Crircle finger trick

PROJECT IDEAS

Glogster.com allows students (and you) to create an online poster. It's a great way to incorporate technology, its eco friendly and easier to grade than lugging around a lot of paper projects.

This is a Glogster on the coordinates of the unit circle and its relation to the trig functions.

http://www.glogster.com/cecook/unit-circle/g-6mbvvsf2b2qlqt52e9kffa0

Unit Circle art project

You can have students create art projects that incorporate the unit circle. The link below shows some examples and you can search the web for unit circle projects and a lot of things will pop up.

https://sites.google.com/a/pleasantonusd.net/johnson/math5/unit-circle-project

Goanimate.com is a website which allows you to create animations for free. It is extremely user friendly and easy to maneuver. Two of the videos on this page were created using Goanimate.com. You can assign students different topics or allow them to choose a topic and create an animation about it.

There are tons of ways to assess students on this material outside of traditional quizzes and testing these are just a few.

RETURN HOME