My Favorite Lesson of 2022 - Yule Blog Challenge

 

My Favorite Lesson of 2022 - Slope Dude

One of the joys of returning to math teaching in 2022 after 8 years of teaching German is that I got to teach about slope, which means I got to introduce my students to Slope Dude.

I first learned about Slope Dude from Sarah Carter at Math=Love, and I've wanted to teach a lesson using him ever since.  This fall, I got my chance!

I was working with a small group of seven pre-algebra students who were being exposed to the concept of slope for the first time.  We started with the video

and played Slope Dude Says.  It did not disappoint!  My students got very into it, and the competition between the final two was intense.  

Then, we drew pictures of the four types of slope in our notes

and color coded our names based on the type of slope in each line segment. (I missed a few here!)

Finally, we progressed to finding the numerical slope of a line from a graph.  

It was a lot of fun, and my students definitely finished the day with a good conceptual understanding of slope.  I could hear them saying "puff, puff positive" and "nice negative" - music to my ears!