A Graphing Matter Activities for Easing into Algebra

Show your middle school, pre-algebra, and algebra students fun and real-world applications of variables and relationships. In A Graphing Matter, comical and sometimes even irreverent scenarios introduce intriguing activities like "A Hare Raising Expose," "Dr. Olivo's Hairy Eyeball Theory," and "Sweatered Fish of the Deep." Students will enjoy collecting and graphing data about how long it takes to say different tongue twisters, how fast different amounts of rubbing alcohol burn in a petri dish (obviously a teacher demonstration!), and how many cubes are necessary to build bathtubs of different sizes.

Activities in A Graphing Matter engage students with concrete problems and experiments in which variables represent quantities they can see and measure. After collecting and graphing data, students analyse graphs to discover patterns, find relationships between variables, write equations, and hypothesise about how changing the experiment would affect the "look" of the graph. These informal explorations of graphs and equations provide a bridge between the concrete and the abstract, building a foundation for more formal operations students will study later in algebra. Your students will find it hard to stop graphing once they are hooked by these activities!

Contents

Part 1: Someday We'll All Look Back on This and Graph
This part is written for the teacher, giving important background for how these materials can help you teach pre-algebra and algebra concepts. You'll learn how concrete activities can help students make connections between four different ways to represent information: data, patterns, graphs, and equations.

Part 2: A Barrel of Graphs
Twenty-six projects comprise this section, including blackline masters for students working in cooperative groups and other projects designed as teacher-led demonstrations. Five different types of activities help students learn the importance of good measurements, how graphs can disprove a theory, how to recognize patterns that show a linear relationship between variables, how to recognise patterns that aren't linear, and how to make connections between equations and graphs.

Part 3: Getting Your Audience to Graph
Here's more guidance for the teacher on how to conduct demonstrations, how to put a unit together, and how to evaluate student work. You'll also find forms students can use to streamline their work.

Part 4: Stop Graphing and Let's Get Serious Answers and Teacher Notes
Each project is supported with teacher notes, example graphs, answers, questions, hints, and extensions.