Lesson+Plan+4+(short)



11/20/08 Lesson 7 reflection Today I taught a lesson on graphing quadratic functions in vertex form. In Algebra 2, it’s hard to make my lessons interactive and engaging, but I really wanted my students to be active in this lesson, so I came up with an activity. The main idea of the lesson is that to teach the students where to find the vertex from the given information in the quadratic function. Instead of just telling them, I decided to have them “discover” it by graphing several functions and finding the vertex on their calculator. It worked perfectly because my students had learned the day before how to find the min/max on their calculators, so I was able to involve that skill. Most everyone came up with a good conjecture at the end of the activity (though I had to explain what a conjecture was). Also, as a warm up I had them work with (x-h) because students have a hard time with that in the vertex form. They did great, it was easy for them, though some of them psyched themselves out thinking they couldn’t do it because it seemed too easy. When it came to actually telling me what h was later during the lesson they still had some trouble, and even I got mixed up, but in the second lesson I did much better. Also, in the second lesson my master teacher suggested we go through the first function on the calculator all together to refresh them of yesterday’s lesson, before handing out the exploration worksheet. During the first lesson, the exploration took a long time because a lot of students needed help figuring out how to find the max/min on their calculator. It went much more smoothly the second time around.