Graphing Review - January 6th

Topics for Today:

Welcome back, students!  I hope everyone had a relaxing, refreshing, and fun break.  We have a lot of material to cover before our trimester ends in February, and we'll be focusing on graphing for most of that time.

Our focus is still on linear equations and their graphs.  So far we have covered finding the slope of a line given two points, slope-intercept form of a line, and standard form of a line.   We also reviewed vocabulary including topics like x- and y-intercepts.

As we further investigate the concepts of graphing, I will introduce the students to the use of Desmos, which is an online graphing calculator.  This resource is a very powerful tool that should help students visualize the "families" of graphs, and how varying one element of an equation will affect the size and shape of the graph.

Graph families will become more important as students move through their study of mathematics.  Understanding how the different components of generic equations can be changed to produce different graphs will be very helpful as students explore conic sections, graph trigonometric functions, and transition to graphing in polar coordinates.

Sections Covered in Textbook:

No new material was covered today.
We reviewed Sections 6-1 through 6-3 (pages 282-303)

Resources & Tutorials:

1) What does the slope of a line mean?
2) How do you find the slope of a line from two points?
3) How do you find the slope of a line from a graph?
4) What is a linear equation?
5) What is the y-intercept?
6) What is the slope-intercept form of a line?
7) What is the standard form of a linear equation?
8) How do you use x- and y-intercepts to graph a line in standard form?

Assignments:

1) Exploring Linear Graphing Activity
2) Slope, Slope-Intercept, and Standard Form Review Worksheet
3) Quiz Thursday (sections 6-1 through 6-4)