I took the conic sections that my students made during our folding conics project and had students turn them into a Conics Patty Paper Poster Project. At least, this was what I planned to do. What I didn’t plan on was my toddler getting sick which caused me to miss an entire week of school …
I created The Great Quadrant Guessing Game several years ago to give my Pre-Calculus students some extra practice determining which quadrant of the coordinate plane was represented by two trigonometric facts. The Great Quadrant Guessing Game For example, in which quadrant is the sine of an angle positive while the cosine of the same angle …
I created this odd one out activity to give my pre-calculus students extra practice identifying coterminal angles. In this activity, students were placed in groups of 4. Each group was given a set of four angle cards. Three of the angles are coterminal angles (meaning they share the same terminal side when sketched in standard …
I decided to use this folding conic sections project to kick off our conics unit in Pre-Calculus. Over the last few years, I have learned how to create parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas using paper folding. I decided that if I could figure out a way to create a circle using paper folding that I would …
I really like the simplicity of this One or Negative One? Trig Identities Task that I found in the 8th Edition of Demana and Waits’ Pre-Calculus Textbook (Section 5.1). That’s why I decided to turn it into a worksheet! Trig identities are one of my favorite topics to teach in Pre-Calculus. To me, they are …
I created these SOH CAH TOA notes for my Pre-Calculus students a few years ago to review how to find the trigonometric functions of an angle, given a triangle. First, we reviewed the different parts of a right triangle. I have also created a poster of the parts of a right triangle that might be …
I love teaching conic sections, so I was super-excited to discover a set of instructions online for building a cone to help students visualize the four different types of conic sections. This made the perfect addition to our last unit of the year in Pre-Calculus – conics! Conics used to be a topic I taught …
Several years ago, I created this deriving the unit circle foldable for my trigonometry students to work through and glue in their interactive notebooks. I tweeted about the foldable, but the file never made it to my blog. Today, I am remedying that! We started with a review of our special right triangles. First, we …
A couple of years ago, I created this trigonometry puzzle to keep my students busy when we unexpectedly finished our lesson with more time to spare than I had planned. This trigonometry puzzle is really the Twisted Wires Puzzle by Cliff Pickover in disguise. To keep my students from googling the puzzle (as they have …
This radian arts and crafts activity is designed to help students conceptually understand what a radian is. As a bonus, it creates a beautiful, mathematical art display for your classroom. This is one of my most popular tweets of all time. People come to my blog searching for it frequently, but until today it has …