Objectives:
1) To use an activity to reinforce much of the material from the previous days' lessons
2) To prepare for the next day's assessment
The activity that follows is one that I have actually used. The lesson can be changed to meet the needs of your students and to meet the needs of yourself in reviewing the lessons that have been taught.
This is known as the human line activity. To set the activity up, you first need to assign each of your students one ordered pair. When I used this activity, I assigned only points in th first quadrant of the coordinate plane plus the x and y axes. The next time that I do this activity, I will assign students numbers in each of the four quadrants. For example, if I had 25 students, I would assign the ordered pairs in the following way:
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You can choose to assign the ordered pairs in different ways if you like, however, this is how I prefer.
Now, how can this be used to reinforce the topics covered in the previous days. As I said, this activity may not incorporate each topic/objective, but it is very useful as a review activity.
The first thing that I would do is to have all of the students who are on the x-axis to stand up and then have all of the students on the y-axis stand up. Then you could have each student in quadrant one stand up, then quadrant two, and so on. This is a quick way to review the parts of the coordinate plane.
Next, you could call out ordered pairs and have them stand up. For instance, I would say," If you are the ordered pair whose x value is 2 and whose y value is 1, please stand up." This will help the students remeber that the general form of an ordered pair is (x,y).
To review how to verify solutions, give the students an equation. Ask them if they are a solution to the given equation and if they are, to stand up. The students will take their x and y values, insert them into the equation and see if they are a solution. For example, use the equation y - 1 = x. You should have the students who are (1,2), (0,1), (-1,0), and (-2,-1) standing.
To review x and y intercepts, I would first ask the following question. If you could possibly be an x intercept please stand up. Discuss why and why not some students are or are not potential x intercepts. I would then do the same for the y intercepts. Pointing out the x intercepts all have a y value of 0 and vice versa for y intercepts would lead to having the students find the intercepts for an equation and then graph the equation. Give the students an equation like x-2y=2. Have the students find the intercepts and then have the students who are the intercepts to stand up. Give them a rope and let them hold it between them. Now ask them if there are any more of you that are points on this line. One more point should be added to the graph, (-2,-2). This will help them see that a line does not just go between two points but extends beyond that.
To review slope, I would call out two points and have them stand up. Have them hold a rope and, before the actual slope is calculated, have the students identify this line as having positive, negative, zero, or undefined slope. Then have them actually calculate the slope of the line. This will be good practice.
To discuss how to graph an equation that is in slope intercept form, given them an equation like y = x - 2. Have the students identify the y-intercept, (0,-2), and have this person stand. Now, have the students determine what the slope of the equation is, 1. Using our rise over run method, what other points, besides (0,-2) are on this line? The students should count up 1 and right 1 and those students that are (1,-1) and (2,0) should stand up. For a check, have the students verify that these two ordered pairs are in fact solutions of this equation.
To discuss parallel lines, call out two sets of ordered pairs, have two ropes, and let each pair hold a rope between them. Then ask the students if the two lines are parallel and how can we tell. Then have them actually calculate the slope to verify if the lines are parallel.
This will probably be enough for one review activity, however, as you can see, this did not cover all of the material. You could incorporate direct variation, solving linear equations by graphing, and also functions into this activity. Even if you did incorporate everything into this activity, I would still assign some sort of chapter review to provide the students with extra examples to work to prepare them for the test the next day.
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