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The purpose of this Warm-up is for students to describe a situation presented by an equation using other representations. Students decide on a context and then create a table and a graph, scaling the axes appropriately to the situation (MP2). Moving between representations of a proportional relationship here will be useful in a following activity where students compare proportional relationships represented in different ways.
Arrange students in groups of 2. Give them 2–3 minutes of quiet work time followed by a whole-class discussion.
The equation could represent a variety of different situations.
Invite several students to share their situations and display their graphs for all to see. Ask:
In this activity, students consider representations of two different proportional relationships and make comparisons between them. They work in groups to compare the relationships and reason quantitatively to answer context specific questions (MP2). Groups make a visual display for their problem set to explain each of their responses and convince others of their accuracy.
Math community
Display the Math Community Chart for all to see. Give students a brief quiet think time to read the norms or invite a student to read them out loud. Tell students that during this activity they are going to practice looking for their classmates putting the norms into action. At the end of the activity, students can share what norms they saw and how the norm supported the mathematical community during the activity.
Tell students that the activity today is about summer jobs. Invite students to share their experiences with a summer job or any other experience they may have earning money, such as doing chores for a neighbor or selling handmade items. If desired, update the contexts of the question sets so they are more familiar to students or to better reflect the experiences of the class.
Then arrange students in groups of 2–3. Provide each group with tools for creating a visual display. Assign each group one of the three question sets (or have groups to choose). Tell groups they will make a visual display for their responses to the questions. The display should clearly demonstrate their reasoning and use multiple representations in order to be convincing (MP3). Let them know that there will be a gallery walk when they finish for the rest of the class to inspect the accuracy of their solutions.
If time allows, consider asking groups to complete all three problems and make a visual display for just one.
Elena babysits her neighbor’s children. Her earnings are given by the equation , where represents the number of hours she worked, and represents the amount of money she earned in dollars.
Jada earns \$7 per hour mowing her neighbors’ lawns.
Clare and Han have summer jobs stuffing envelopes for two different companies.
Han earns \$15 for every 300 envelopes he finishes.
Clare’s earnings can be seen in the table.
| number of envelopes |
money earned in dollars |
|---|---|
| 400 | 40 |
| 900 | 90 |
Tyler plans to start a lemonade stand and is trying to perfect his recipe for lemonade. He wants to make sure the recipe doesn’t use too much lemonade mix (lemon juice and sugar) but still tastes good.
Recipe 1 is given by the equation , where represents the amount of lemonade mix in cups, and represents the amount of water in cups.
Recipe 2 is given in the table.
| lemonade mix (cups) | water (cups) |
|---|---|
| 10 | 50 |
| 13 | 65 |
| 21 | 105 |
If Tyler had 16 cups of lemonade mix, how many cups of water would he need for each recipe? Explain your reasoning by creating a graph or a table.
Some students may confuse the values for the rate of change of a situation. For example, Lemonade Recipe 1's equation, , shows that the rate of change is 4 cups of water per cup of lemonade mix. Students may switch these values and think that the rate of change is 4 cups lemonade mix per cup of water. Consider:
Asking “How did you find the rate of change and what does it mean?”
Prompting students to list a few additional values or sketch a graph to see if it matches their interpretation of the rate of change.
Begin with a gallery walk for students to see how other groups answered the same set of questions they did. In small groups, invite students who created a display for the same set of problems to discuss what is the same and what is different about their work and representations on the posters. Here are some questions for discussion:
Math Community
Conclude the discussion by inviting 2–3 students to share a norm they identified in action. Provide this sentence frame to help students organize their thoughts in a clear, precise way:
The goal is for students to discuss strategies they can use when comparing two proportional relationships. Have students conduct a second gallery walk to see how other groups answered questions about the two contexts they did not make a display for. Here are some questions for discussion:
When two proportional relationships are represented in different ways, we can compare them by finding a common piece of information.
For example, Clare’s earnings are represented by the equation , where is her earnings in dollars for working hours.
The table shows some information about Jada’s earnings.
| time worked (hours) | earnings (dollars) |
|---|---|
| 7 | 92.75 |
| 4.5 | 59.63 |
| 37 | 490.25 |
If we want to know who makes more per hour, we can look at the rate of change for each situation.
In Clare’s equation, we see that the rate of change is 14.50. This tells us that she earns $14.50 per hour. For Jada, we can calculate the rate of change by dividing her earnings in one row by the hours worked in the same row. For example, using the last row, the rate of change is 13.25 since . This tells us that Clare earns more dollars per hour than Jada.