Topic: Cartesian Coordinate System

Grade Level Category: 7-12

Strategy: Open-Ended Questions; Self-Assessment

Objective(s) Being Assessed and/or Purposes for the Assessment:
To assess where students are in their knowledge of coordinate plane.

Materials Required:
Newsprint and markers

Description of the Activity:
On the first day of school I had my students work in assigned groups. Students were given a list of vocabulary words from the first chapter of the book most of which dealt with the coordinate plane. The groups were to give an explanation of these words by graphing, giving a formula, writing a definition, or whatever they came up with to explain the term. They recorded this information/explanation on their newsprint. The words I gave them were: abscissa, coordinate plane, coordinates, domain, origin, quadrants, range, relation, x-axis, y-axis, distance formula, function, ordered pair, ordinate, Pythagoras, Pythagorean theorem, slope, x-intercept, and y-intercept. Students were given about 25 minutes to accomplish this. During the last 15 minutes of class I had each group take several terms and give their explanation of those terms to the whole class.

Extension(s):
I used this as a pre-assessment technique. However, it could also be used as a review at the end of a lesson.

Management Tips:
Coordinate graph newsprint is available in pre-printed form from various teaching resources.
The real purpose of this activity was to see how much the students knew so that I didn't waste time reteaching things with which the students were already familiar. However, I did give the students credit for doing the activity.



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