In this partner activity, students take turns matching descriptions of situations to graphs of those situations. As students trade roles explaining their thinking and listening, they have opportunities to explain their reasoning and to critique the reasoning of others (MP3).

Much discussion takes place between partners. Invite students to share how they connected the description of a real situation to a graphical representation of the situation.

Direct students’ attention to the reference created using Collect and Display. Ask students to share the features they looked for to connect the representations. Invite students to borrow language from the display as needed. As they respond, update the reference to include additional phrases.

Here are some additional questions for discussion:

• “How are Mai’s and Elena’s trips similar and different? How did you recognize which graph goes with which description?” (They both started at home and went away from home at a constant rate. Mai walked and Elena ran. I could see the difference in the graph by looking at the slope of the line.)
• “Lin went away from home, then back toward her house. How far away from home did she get? How do you know?” (She got almost 200 meters away from home since that is the top of the graph shown.)
• “When Priya begins walking, does she turn around to go home? Explain how you know.” (No, she continues to move away from home. I know because the graph continues to get higher away from the -axis, meaning that her distance from home is still growing.)

The purpose of the discussion is to clarify language to connect graphs to the situations they represent. Select students to share their descriptions. After each description, ask if other students have different ways to describe the situation. Encourage students to be creative in their descriptions. For example, the last graph could be described as a rocket taking off from its “home planet.”