Comments on: A Good Day in Precalculus

By: Laura

Laura — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 13:11:54 +0000

I actually used exactly the same approach as you did. At first my students were scared or intimidated just to draw the next step. Eventually we moved past that and they even became comfortable filling out the table for n=1, n=2, n=3, etc. But when I asked them to write an expression for n they really struggled! They were stuck in trying to find a pattern of how to get FROM step 2 to 3 or step 3 to 4. Theh would say things like, you just have to add 5 every time. They had a very hard time understanding that the goal was to create an expression for any number n. Any suggestions on that part?

By: Michael Fenton

Michael Fenton — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 05:14:29 +0000

Laura, I glossed over that since it would probably have doubled the length of the blog post to include all of the details of our approach. The short version: I project the image, ask students to draw the next step, then to sketch out the 27th step, then build a table of numbers for steps 1-5, 10, 27, and n. Try to make connections between the visual, numerical, and algebraic structures. Then use our expression to write and solve an equation to answer a “what step will have such and such number of items” style of question.

I may write a post about how Visual Patterns plays out in my classroom sometime soon to solicit feedback. My general frustration is that I’m still stuck in an all-eyes-on-the-same-page approach. Having trouble breaking out of that…

In the meantime, would you be willing to share how you use Visual Patterns in your class?

By: Laura

Laura — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 04:31:32 +0000

When you say “we worked through a visual pattern” what do you mean? Last month in one of my classes we focused on visual patterns at the beginning of class each day but I’m wondering what that looked like in your classroom.