SOH CAH TOA Foldable

I created this SOH CAH TOA foldable for my trigonometry students to glue in their interactive notebooks.

Our geometry standards include basic right triangle trig, but I’ve found that my students’ experience with this topic is greatly lacking.  They remember learning SOH CAH TOA, but they never really did know what they were doing.  It’s been so fun to teach them trig from the beginning and see the light bulbs start to go off.  “Oh, this is what we were supposed to do in geometry!  Why didn’t they ever tell us it was this simple?!?”

Before I introduced my students to the basic trig ratios, I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page when it came to naming the parts of a right triangle.  My students had a hard time wrapping their minds around the difference between the adjacent side and the opposite side for some reason.  

We made a simple three-door foldable with the formulas for sine, cosine, and tangent.

Inside the flaps:

My students referenced this foldable A LOT!  In fact, they’re still referencing during our unit on the unit circle.

Alternate Version of Foldable from 2016-2017

They labeled the outside of each door with the abbreviation for a trig function.  

On the inside of the foldable, they wrote the equations for the trig functions and drew triangles showing the given sides for each function.