Intent

In this final activity in Graphs and Equations, students organize what they have learned over the past few days about equations and their graphs.

Mathematics

This is the last of four activities in which students build their intuition about different types of functions and their representations and transformations.

Progression

Students will begin this activity individually and then share and combine their summaries in a class discussion. They will include their work on this activity in their unit portfolios.

Approximate Time

30 minutes for activity (at home or in class)

25 minutes for discussion

Classroom Organization

Individuals, followed by whole-class discussion

Materials

Work on the activities Graphing Free-for-All, Graphs in Search of Equations I, and Graphs in Search of Equations II

Doing the Activity

Depending on how students took notes as groups presented their function families, this summary should reinforce all they have learned about intercepts and shapes of data.

Discussing and Debriefing the Activity

The time spent helping students to use everyone’s work to build a set of useful notes—documenting different function types and their rules, In-Out tables, and graphs, along with ways to transform them—will pay dividends in solving the unit problem and in later units in the curriculum.

You might work as a class to make posters of each function family, including linear functions, square-root functions, quadratic functions, and exponential functions.