My Ramblings and a Linear Toothpick Activity

For those of you who don't know (which so far is nobody because only my husband reads this, hi Honey!), I teach a second block of Pre-Algebra for freshmen in high school. I don't do the fun stuff this year of assigning homework, PLC meetings, PDs, or assigning grades, but I do get to come up with creative ways for students to further interact with the material they are learning in their first math block.

Last week, they started working with functions. Which is nice because if I spent one more second going over converting between fractions, decimals, and percents, I was going to lose my mind. But I can get on board with some functions. Or rather, put the FUN in FUNctions. I like teaching students how to determine if a relation is a function. And then, oh so swiftly, the class moved on to... linear functions! But not using function notation and calling them linear equations right after learning about functions. One day, I'll get more education and try to change the way teachers talk about math in the classroom. For now, I will show you pictures of toothpicks lined up in patterns:

 I created a worksheet where they had to record in a table how many toothpicks it required to make a square (4) and then how many toothpicks it takes to create each square after that (3). So the rate of change, or slope, is three! For every three toothpicks that are used in the pattern, one additional square is formed.

Then of course I included some independent practice problems of real-world situations where students had to fill out a given table. Just your typical gym membership and cell phone plan-type situations.

Here's the link if you want to use my activity!