My non-AP calc students have truly blown me away with the ease at which they've taken to derivative rules this unit. I went into this unit with a relatively open idea of pacing- what my AP kids can do in a day might take 3-4 with these kiddos. But, they're killing it....when isolated, their calculus is beautiful.
Unfortunately, the calculus isn't going to be "isolated" as we move on in the course and the struggle became very, very real as we started implicit differentiation. With that in mind, I write this sorting activity to help scaffold students in their algebraic skills.I have students identify the initial problem, then work on whiteboards to determine the next steps. They had great conversations and asked even better questions. Once this was finished, I saw a lot more independence as we solved implicit differentiation problems without the scaffolding....success!
Here's the original document if you want it!
