This unit is one of my favorites. I love slope and teaching it. Graphing slope is so much fun, although I want to hit my head against a wall at some point when I have to keep going over it and over it when students don't remember the which one is the slope and the intercept when we graph. It looks like I had a typo on my tab divider at the bottom. I'm very notorious for typos LOL. I teach this unit a little more in-depth for Algebra than I do Pre-Algebra and I use some different foldables and materials for each class. Stay tuned for when I get my Pre-Algebra units uploaded and for next years lessons. |
Lesson 1: Determining Slope
This is the first lesson I do with my Algebra classes. We fill out this foldable and then I give them some practice. Most students catch on quickly, but I have a few who struggle. I almost feel like I should break this lesson up into two or more. I teach each one of these separately in Pre-Algebra. Slope from a table and two points always kicks their butts. When they graph the slope, they go all kinds of directions until they get that to the right is always right whether they go up or down.
Lesson 2: Direct/Indirect Variation
This lesson is from the Alg textbook we follow. I found this foldable from someone's blog and she had the foldable paper posted, but not the card sort, so I just retyped it. I didn't spend a lot of time on this with my students. One class period actually, and they completed an IXL for practice.
Lesson 3: Slope and Intercepts
I got this from another person's blog. Not sure which one, but I have used it 3 years in a row and I use this one with my Pre-Algebra classes as well. They do pretty good folding and cutting the booklets and filling them out.
I think next year I am going to do a horizontal and vertical line booklet I found because they struggle with it badly.
I think next year I am going to do a horizontal and vertical line booklet I found because they struggle with it badly.
Lesson 4: Graphing Slope Intercept Form
I'm usually pretty good at copying things so they work out correctly when they get folded or cut, but this one, I copied the inside upside down. Oopps! When I started teaching 8th grade, I had not ever taught slope in 7th grade, so I remember going back and looking over how to graph again from slope intercept form. I had to do a lot of that teaching Algebra for the first time in forever. I can't imagine going back and teaching 7th grade again. I love upper level math, but I love the middle school age students!!! Teaching 8th grade is kind of the best of both worlds to me. Get to teach the age I love and some of the material I love.
Lesson 5: Point Slope Form
I found this foldable a few years ago and it works great with my students. I do not complete the bottom part with them. I also this past year added 4 extra examples for them to pull the point and slope from point slope form and graph it and then pull a point and slope from a graph and write in point slope form. The practice WS I have them complete has them doing the stuff on the yellow paper, so I thought I'd give them examples to follow instead of them trying to figure it out. Made life a lot easier!
Lesson 6: Standard Form of a Linear Equation
I believe I got this journal from Math = Love but don't quote me on that. I have used it the past three years and it works well with my students. It gives me 2 methods to choose from when graphing from standard form, which I like. It is interesting to see who chooses what method they like better. | |
Lesson 7: Parallel & Perpendicular Slope
This is the first year I used this booklet. I like it because the only things students have to do it fold and cut and follow along while I go through it. After we did that, I gave them their practice page and we did examples from it so they could get hands on practice. Most of them used this every time they needed to remember which one was what. I had them tape in a pocket to store the booklet in.
Lesson 8: Creating and Analyzing Scatterplots
We follow the textbook for this unit and scatterplots is in with slope, which I understand, but it just feels weird teaching it with slope. In Pre-Algebra, we do an entire unit on Scatter Plots and Two-Way Tables. I allowed two days on this and I don't know if that is enough. I'm not worried about them analyzing them, but creating them is a struggle. They also don't want to find the line of best fit which they basically just finished doing with all the stuff on slope.
Lesson 9: Graphing Absolute Value Equations
Again, I can't remember where I got this one, but of course it was FREE! I have used this the last two years and it works out well. I don't show them any other method other than making a table of values. We don't have enough time to go more in-depth to show them how graph them based on what the equations says. They notice that the graphs shift different directions based on seeing the different types of equations, but we don't go further than that.
You can find your copies of the files here.
**Note: I may have not uploaded every file. My laptop died in the middle of uploading. Let me know if anything is missing.
**Note: I may have not uploaded every file. My laptop died in the middle of uploading. Let me know if anything is missing.