NAGS Foldable for Multiple Representations of Relations

I want to share a NAGS Foldable I made for my Algebra 2 students to review multiple representations of relations.

This year, I am taking an entirely different approach to Algebra 2 than last year.  Last year, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into with teaching Algebra 2.  I tried following the curriculum as laid out by the textbook, but it did not meet my needs or my students’ needs.  I ended up drastically deviating from the textbook, but the course felt unorganized.  We covered everything we needed for the end of instruction exam, but I was stressed.  And, when I’m stressed, my kids start to get stressed.  That is not a good thing.  My Algebra 2 interactive notebook last year was pitiful.  I didn’t spend as much time on it as I should have.

This year, I am writing my own Algebra 2 curriculum to meet the unique needs of the students at my school, and I am really focusing on doing a good job on the interactive notebook pages for Algebra 2.

Here are the first entries in our Algebra 2 Interactive Notebook:

 The purpose of this NAGS foldable is to review the different ways to represent relations.  Many of my Algebra 2 students barely passed Algebra 1.  Others have not had math for a couple of years.  My plan for this year is to build the idea of a function in the first unit.  We will discuss the requirements a relation must meet to be a function.  We will learn how to find the intercepts, domain and range, increasing and decreasing intervals, etc.  We will find inverses.  And, we will practice transforming functions.

Once students have an overview of functions, we will discuss each specific type of function in depth.  I plan on progressing from linear functions to exponential functions to quadratic functions to radical functions to rational functions.  Somewhere in there, I will need to throw in absolute value functions and logarithmic functions.  Let’s just say I have a lot of planning ahead of me.

NAGS is an acronym to remember the four different ways to represent a relation.

• N – Numerically
• A – Algebraically
• G – Graphically
• S – Sentence (Verbally)

Numerical representations include ordered pairs and a table.  Graphical representations include a coordinate plane and mapping diagrams.

For homework, students had to create 1 original relation for each of the four different types of representations.