Onele and Slope

Onele volunteered to draw a plane on the board for us today. The kids took turns showing me on the board how they know how to plot points on the graph and connect the dots into a line. It was very impressive. I asked them how to express the line as an equation and they weren't sure about that, but they really wanted to know (these kids are a dream). So we discussed y=mx+b and specifically:

We learned how to calculate the slope of a line.

And this is why today is the most glorious of days...

Because at the beginning, the Shining Stars did not know about slope. They'd never heard of it. And when I first explained the concept and how to calculate it, they were very, very confused. By the end of the day, though, they all got it. We made up a little ditty that went, "The change in Y over the change in X - that's slope!" We sang it together in unison and tilted our bodies around to show we knew what slope meant in the life of a line. And soon they were quickly solving every problem I threw at them. And when I asked if this slope stuff was all too easy for them they all laughed and nodded.

So we gave ourselves a hearty round of applause!

Tomorrow, we'll branch out to negative slopes and look at how different slope values translate into different types of lines.

This is very fun.