My personal life has been turned upside down. I enjoy blogging about our new curriculum. I look forward to being able to look back next year in order to help me when we go through a 2nd time. However, when I have to cut some things out because of a lack of time blogging is the first thing cut. The thing is...blogging just helps me to organize my thoughts and see where I have been and where I am going. I think I might could really be diagnosed with ADHD...I doubt that any of my colleagues would disagree. I am kind of joking but I really do think it is true. Forcing myself to focus and "verbalize" what I am doing with my classes helps me to reflect and think. So...here is a brief summary of what we have done so far in Cookies.
How Many of Each Kind? - The students brainstorm the number of dozens of iced and plain cookies that meet the 4 constraints that are mentioned.
A Simpler Cookie - This activity allows the students to only worry about prep time. They assume unlimited amounts of dough, icing and oven space. Then they are asked to try to find the most profit. We believed the max profit in this case was 150 plain and 0 iced.
Manipulating Inequalities - This activity allowed the students to "discover" the rules for solving inequalities. They also practice graphing inequalities in one variable. When going over #3 ask the students what would make the inequalities where you multiplied or divided by a negative "ok" again.
My Simplest Inequality - In Part I the students practice solving inequalities in one variable. We supplemented with an additional worksheet on solving and graphing one-variable inequalities. In Part II we investigated equivalent inequalities. Then in #3 we took inequalities and wrote them in simpler ways.
Simplifying Cookies - In this activity you take the Cookies Constraints and write them as simpler inequalities. We did not spend much time on this but I did write the simpler inequalities on chart paper.
Picturing Cookies - In this activity students take the constraints and use 2 colors to indicate ordered pairs that either work or do not work for the cookies constraints. They will hopefully recognize a "dividing line" that halves the graphs into correct solutions and incorrect solutions. I gave each group one constraint to test and had them put it on chart paper after they did it individually on graph paper.
Inequalities Stories - I gave this as a bonus opportunity...
A Hat of a Different Color - This POW was assigned when I had a sub. I think it would be a good idea to use hats or objects and act out the situation a few times in class before the students try to figure out the color of Carletta's hat. Her hat is blue. If Arturo couldn't tell then the 2 girls could NOT have both had red hats. One of them must have been blue. If Belicia had opened her eyes and seen a red hat on Carletta she would have known her hat was blue. However, since she passed Carletta must have been wearing a blue hat.
Healthy Animals - You create 3 inequalities - one for fat, one for protein and one for total amount. I did not have my class graph this activity.
**Picturing Cookies - Part II - We used this to "reteach" graphing using slope-intercept form. We used Desmos to show the graphs but I don't know if I should have waited on the technology... Anyway, it is extremely important to have each student to graph these correctly and identify the feasible region. They will need it to solve the unit problem. I did the graph on chart paper and left it hanging in the room.
What's My Inequality - I really liked this activity to help us tie the work in the unit to "traditional algebra problems." This is the first time the text mentions the differences in when to make the line solid and when to make the line dashed.
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