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 …
Pre-Calculus
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 …
I created this exponent rules review game in February of 2020. It exposes students to actual ACT questions from past released exams, and it gives students a chance to play the role of exam writer by crafting tricky distractors for each question. I originally crafted this review game for my Pre-Calculus students. I wanted to …
I created these unit circle magnets to use with my dry erase magnetic unit circle from EAI Education. I plan to use the magnets both as a way to have a large unit circle on the wall of my classroom and for various activities throughout the year. When I share pictures of my magnetic unit …
Back in February, I learned how to use paper folding to create an ellipse. Since then, I’ve wanted to try my hand at paper folding a hyperbola as well. It’s taken a few months, but I finally did it! Previously, I have bogged about paper folding both parabolas and ellipses. I learned about folding a …
I created this set of real number system cards several years ago to give my Pre-Calculus students much-needed practice determining which subsets of the real number system a number belongs to. This was one of our first lessons of the year, and it was a great exercise in understanding definitions, practicing mathematical precision, and using …
Several years ago, I created a double angle identities joke worksheet as a promposal when one of my trig students wanted to ask another student in the class to prom. I shared the file, but it was really only useful if you had a student named Sam who wanted to ask another student to prom. …
I created these trig functions posters a few years ago when I was teaching a year-long trigonometry course. Somehow, they never got a blog post of their own. I created separate posters for the three basic trig functions and the three reciprocal trig functions. I designed these posters to print on 11 x 17 cardstock. …
I created this Parts of a Right Triangle poster several years ago when I was teaching trigonometry. I wanted to emphasize the vocabulary words for adjacent, opposite, and hypotenuse before we jumped into right triangle trig. I designed this parts of a right triangle poster to print on 11 x 17 cardstock. I hung this …
Yesterday, I got the urge to create something. Creation is one of my favorite parts of my job. I love to put in some time and effort to create an activity for my students to use. I find not only the process of creation to be re-energizing but also the act of seeing students all …
I ran across this ten day syllabus for pre-calculus while searching for something else on google. It captured so many of the experiences I’ve had teaching Pre-Calc, that I thought I should share it on Twitter. My tweet was liked 881 times and retweeted 184 times, so I guess it resonated with a bunch of other math …
I’m here today to share a trig ratios puzzle with you. I’m currently using part of my summer to create some activities for my Pre-Calculus classes for this upcoming year. Last year, I felt like I definitely spent more of my time creating things for my Algebra 2 classes than my Pre-Calc classes. This was …
A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a trig identities matching activity I created. I promised to share the files, so that is what I am doing today. Sorry it’s late! This is a different activity than the trig identity group challenge I shared a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I actually used this …
I created this free printable trig identities cheat sheet for my Pre-Calculus students to reference as we work through our unit on trigonometric identities. I do not require my pre-calc students to memorize the various trig identities. I am more interested in my students being able to use and apply trig identities than to be …
I created this Verifying Trig Identities Worksheet for my Pre-Calculus students to have some extra practice during our unit on trigonometric identities. Students are asked to verify each trig identity. More specifically, they are to show that one side of the equation is equivalent to the other side of the equation. Students must show each …
This past week, my pre-calculus students have been tackling verifying trig identities. I came down with a cold Sunday night, took Monday off at the insistence of my husband, and suffered through the rest of the week. Introducing trig identities while sick and lacking energy/motivation on Tuesday was not my best and brightest idea. So, …
A few weeks ago, I had my best lesson of the year so far in pre-calculus as we were studying the 12 basic functions. My students were engaged like never before, and they became super competitive throughout the activity. They did way more questions than I ever would have been able to get them to …