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Graphing Functions, with a Freebie

I can't believe it's May already! Time is moving so quickly (as usual), and we are down to about one month left of school!

Our state testing wrapped up and we have started working with function tables and graphing function equations, on a pretty basic level.  We used some practice from our textbook, and the students created functions for each other to graph, but I was feeling that it just wasn't enough practice. I couldn't find anything to suit my needs "exactly," so I decided to make a shorter Footloose activity to give the students some extra practice (along with the movement that Footloose provides).

Click to download for free:)
I created 15 cards that give the directions and the functions. The cards all have the same directions, but they have different functions to graph.

The answer grid for this activity is actually 2 pages - one for students to choose x-values and find ordered pairs using a table and a second one for them to graph the functions. The grids on the graphing page are definitely small, and I was a little worried that they might be too small, but overall, the students had no trouble with the tiny grids. I had one student (out of 125 students) who asked if he could use bigger graph paper, which was fine. The rest of the students did well with the grids.

Before they began choosing x-values for their tables, we talked about the fact that the grids only went up to 10, in both the positive and negative directions. Knowing this, they needed to be careful to choose x-values that would result in the y-values being less than 10. As the students worked, it was interesting to see which students purposely chose negative x-values, to challenge themselves to work with negative numbers (we haven't officially studied operations with negative integers), while others stayed with the comfortable positives.




The students really enjoyed this one!  Feel free to download and use it with your students:)






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