Building Functions – Thinking Ahead to Calculus

My ninth graders are working on building functions and modeling in the final unit of the year. There is plenty of good material out there for doing these tasks as a way to master the Common Core standards that describe these skills.

I had a sudden realization that a great source for these types of tasks might be my Calculus materials. Related rates, optimization, and applications of integrals in a Calculus course generally require students to write models of functions and then apply their differentiation or integration knowledge to arrive at a result. The first step in these questions usually involves writing a function, with subsequent question parts requiring Calculus methods to be applied to that function.

I dug into my resources for these topics and found that these questions might be excellent modeling tasks for the ninth grade students if I simply pull out the steps that require Calculus. Today’s lesson using these adapted questions was really smooth, and felt good from a vertical planning standpoint.

I could be late to this party. My apologies if you realized this well before I did.