WJHS+Geometry+9th+Grade

This class was considered an honors course. The students in this class were chosen from a young age to move the faster track through math when they demonstrated above average qualities. I first wanted to share a great activity I showed to them. I was teaching the class alone that day (with a sub sitting in the back of the room), and it was one of the moments where I could see the kids' faces "ooh" and "aah" as things started to mathematically click in their brains.

The lesson was on focus points of ellipses. For those that are not in a math related field, these points are the places of an ellipse where the sum of the distance from the two points to any point along the curve in the graph. If this doesn't make sense to you, that's okay. This is why I did a similar demonstration to the one shown in the following video:

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The toothpicks in this case are the focus points, and the string shows that the sum of the two distances is constant. I did this demonstration on the whiteboard with magnets as the foci.

After doing this physical representation for them, I also showed them an interactive website that displays the sum of the distances. This time, the ellipse/foci were on a graph, so it also relates more closely to the context in which these students would be seeing foci. The first interactive graph was the one we focused on for this lesson.

If you'd like to see my experiences in WJHS's 9th Grade Algebra course, feel free to follow the provided link.