Graphs, Graphs and Further Graphs

Recently my Year 11 class have been doing a lot of work around graphs. Not plotting graphs, but the stuff that comes under the banner of “further graphs”, so recognising, sketching and transforming quadratics, cubics, logarithmic graphs, exponential graphs and everyone’s favourite trigonometric graphs.

I hadn’t taught it to a KS4 class before, so I had a good long think about it and created some new resources, and rejigged a couple from A Level classes! You can see all the resources on TES here.

I started off with a match up, I gave them a number of graphs and the equations they matched too, some they had met before, some they hadn’t, but I gave them calculators and whiteboards and 15 minutes to have a crack at it. The class responded really well to this and a number of them managed to correctly match up all the graphs to the equations without any help whatsoever. The rest of the lesson was spent sketching and solving quadratics, they had touched on this before, but were glad to revisit it.

The next lesson was spent on cubics, sketching and solving and becoming familiar with the shapes, and how to factorise ones with a constant term of zero.

The next lesson was spend on transforming graphs, this was a lesson adapted from my A level class and it worked well, the class fully getting to grips with graph transformations. To finish the unit I then did the lesson from the standards box on trig graphs. They also responded well. I’ve not use all the activities from the standards box, but I have always found the ones I have used have gone well!