Making Sense of Linear Inequalities

We were treasure hunters today!!!! And the students LOVED IT!!!!

I gave them a map of our town (a different region than I used here) and told them I was going to give them clues about some recently confirmed buried treasure. They laughed and got into it - thank goodness - because I would have sounded like an idiot even more than I already did trying to talk in my best pirate voice.

I told them that part of their clues were going to include roads and part were not, they needed to show those things differently on their map. Many used a darker line to show included roads.

The clues were:

• The treasure is somewhere south of 8th street.
• The treasure is either on Tiger Boulevard or east of it, but definitely not west of Tiger Blvd.
• The treasure is either on or north of 14th street.
• The treasure is west of J street.

This gave them a relatively small region of town where the treasure could be located.

Then they did a partner activity. They had to build a barrier and I gave each partner a paper with two maps, one with a shaded region and one without. They had to describe their shaded region to their partner using clues like mine, and then listen as their partner described. It really made them focus on precise language and boundary lines.

When we transitioned to inequalities on a coordinate grid they were pros already! The dotted line/solid line made prefect sense and shading towards the region that satisfies the inequality also made sense. Success!!

I will definitely be using this type of introduction in the future!

What innovative ways do you use to introduce this (or any other!) topic. I'd love to steal them :)