With Valentines Day starting out our week of love for mathematics, we performed on a Common Formative Assessment (CFA) before returning to our exploration of operations on rational functions. On Friday, our week culminated in an entire class engaged in tackling a problem for a small extrinsic reward. 

With Valentines Day launching our week of love for mathematics, we incorporated a Common Formative Assessment and finished (for now) our journey into systems of equations. Mr Ruesch brought back the Pythagorean Theorem, having us explore the square of the legs as an area to add together to form the area of the square of the hypotenuse. We applied this learning to a task from Illustrative Mathematics regarding a football player running toward another player in a 2007 game involving the Patriots. We will continue our exploration of this task next week.

This week's learning journey allowed us a deeper dive into learning how to graph rational functions, sequencing out the pieces that are valuable to create an accurate graph. Later students will learn how rational functions model so many things of our physical world. 

This week's learning allowed us multiple reps into slope, exponential rules, and a mystery guest we could only answer Yes/No questions. We learned a lot more about the systems of linear equations, especially the method of substitution. Next week we begin the dive into elimination.

Our second week we are covering mutliplication of polynomials and division of polynomials through area models, connecting the algebra tiles work we tied into previously. We use this as a launch pad for rational functions.

Solving systems through graphing and substitution were the overall themes. Meanwhile, we continue to focus on multiple reps of finding slope, computing exponents, and solving multi-step equations.