In this task students draw the graphs of two functions from verbal descriptions. Both functions describe the same situation but changing the viewpoint of the observer changes where the function has output value zero. This small twist forces the students to think carefully about the interpretation of the dependent variable.
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These problems are meant to be a progression which require more sophisticated understandings of the meaning of fractions as students progress through them.
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This task is the second in a series of three tasks that use inequalities in the same context at increasing complexity in 6th grade, 7th grade and in HS algebra. Students write and solve inequalities, and represent the solutions graphically.
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This task asks students to glean contextual information about bird eggs from a collection of measurements of said eggs organized in a scatter plot. In particular, students are asked to identify a correlation and use it to make interpolative predictions, and reason about the properties of specific eggs via the graphical presentation of the data.
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This task requires students to be able to reason abstractly about fraction multiplication as it would not be realistic for them to solve it using a visual fraction model. Even though the numbers are too messy to draw out an exact picture, this task still provides opportunities for students to reason about their computations to see if they make sense.
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In this task students use linear equations to solve a real world problem.
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There is a non-mathematical fact that students must know about mixtures in order to answer this question. When salt is dissolved in water, the salt disperses evenly through the mixture, so any sample from the mixture that has the same volume will have the same amount of salt.
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Students must calculate the volume of a cone in this real world task.
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This series of 5 word problems lead up to the final problem. Most students should be able to answer the first two questions without too much difficulty. The decimal numbers may cause some students trouble, but if they make a drawing of the road that the girls are riding on, and their positions at the different times, it may help. The third question has a bit of a challenge in that students won't land on the exact meeting time by making a table with distance values every hour. The fourth question addresses a useful concept for problems involving objects moving at different speeds which may be new to sixth grade students.
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Students' first experience with transformations is likely to be with specific shapes like triangles, quadrilaterals, circles, and figures with symmetry. Exhibiting a sequence of transformations that shows that two generic line segments of the same length are congruent is a good way for students to begin thinking about transformations in greater generality.
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In this instructional task students are given two inequalities, one as a formula and one in words, and a set of possible solutions. They have to decide which of the given numbers actually solve the inequalities.
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This is the last problem of seven in a series about ratios set in the context of a classroom election. Since the number of voters is not known, the problem is quite abstract and requires a deep understanding of ratios and their relationship to fractions.
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The purpose of this series of tasks is to build in a natural way from accessible, concrete problems involving volume to a more abstract understanding of volume. In this iteration, we do away with the lines that delineate individual unit cubes (which makes it more abstract) and generalize from cubes to rectangular prisms.
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This task provides a context for some of the questions asked in "6.NS Multiples and Common Multiples." A scaffolded version of this task could be adapted into a teaching task that could help motivate the need for the concept of a common multiple.
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The purpose of this task is to introduce the idea of exponential growth and then connect that growth to expressions involving exponents. It illustrates well how fast exponential expressions grow.
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This problem, the third in a series of tasks set in the context of a class election, is more than just a problem of computing the number of votes each person receives. In fact, that isnŐt enough information to solve the problem. One must know how many votes it takes to make one half of the total number of votes. Although the numbers are easy to work with, there are enough steps and enough things to keep track of to lift the problem above routine.
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This exploration can be done in class near the beginning of a unit on graphing parabolas. Students need to be familiar with intercepts, and need to know what the vertex is.
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It is possible to say a lot about the solution to an equation without actually solving it, just by looking at the structure and operations that make up the equation. This exercise turns the focus away from the familiar Ňfinding the solutionÓ problem to thinking about what it really means for a number to be a solution of an equation.
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This is the first version of a task asking students to find the areas of triangles that have the same base and height, and is the most concrete.
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This problem requires a comparison of rates where one is given in terms of unit rates, and the other is not.
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