MAFS.912.A-REI.1.2Archived Standard

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones is a model-eliciting activity that asks teams of students to work as forensic anthropologists and use equations to determine the height and gender of persons to whom a series of newly discovered bones may belong.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson students will solve radical equations, showing how extraneous solutions may arise. Students will solve radical equations that model real-world relationships.

Type: Lesson Plan

This activity will explore the connection between wavelength and frequency of colors in the visible light using web sites, hand-spectroscopes, spectral tubes and CSI type investigations.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will tackle a real-world situation regarding starting a business that requires a rational equation to evaluate the plan. Students will determine a method and set of steps for solving rational equations and then revisit the original scenario and solve using the new method they have synthesized. Students will also explore, through collaborative learning structures, the concept of extraneous solutions.

Type: Lesson Plan

Learn how to solve rational functions by getting common denominators in this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Learn how to solve rational linear and quadratic equations using cross multiplication in this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

In order to engage this task meaningfully, students must be aware of the convention that va for a positive number a refers to the positive square root of a. The purpose of the task is to show students a situation where squaring both sides of an equation can result in an equation with more solutions than the original one.

Type: Problem-Solving Task

The purpose of this task is to continue a crucial strand of algebraic reasoning begun at the middle school level (e.g, 6.EE.5). By asking students to reason about solutions without explicitly solving them, we get at the heart of understanding what an equation is and what it means for a number to be a solution to an equation. The equations are intentionally very simple; the point of the task is not to test technique in solving equations, but to encourage students to reason about them.

Type: Problem-Solving Task

The purpose of this task is to provide an opportunity for students to reason about equivalence of equations. The instruction to give reasons that do not depend on solving the equation is intended to focus attention on the transformation of equations as a deductive step.

Type: Problem-Solving Task

This task provides a simple but interesting and realistic context in which students are led to set up a rational equation (and a rational inequality) in one variable, and then solve that equation/inequality for an unknown variable. It seems likely to be direct and relevant enough to be used for assessment purposes, either in part or in whole. Alternatively, this task could be used as a motivation for studying equations of this form in general, as while students might be able to solve the first part by trial and error, this becomes rather tedious for the later parts. Teachers might also find this task could be used to illustrate standard A-REI.A.1 if some more emphasis were placed on the reasoning behind the algebraic manipulations provided in the solutions.

Type: Problem-Solving Task

This video will demonstrate how to simplify square roots involving variables.

Type: Tutorial

This video will demonstrate how to solve radical equations with additional practice problems.

Type: Tutorial