What’s been happening in Grade 11

Lately grade 11s have been working on understanding periodic and sinusoidal functions. After our linguine math day we started off by making tables of values for both f(x)=sinx and f(x)=cosx.

We made connections between the CAST rule and the quadrants we’ve become familiar with, and these graphs. We learned a lot of vocabulary like amplitude, period, cycle, and axis.

Next we started to do some modelling, thinking about ferris wheels, or pebbles stuck in tires, and the height over time, or height over distance in each of those situations. Next we got into some transformations, a good chance to review mapping statements once more.

Today we explored some fun problems like where does sinx=cosx? We saw tables of values, graphs, quadrants and the cast rule and special triangles, and also algebra where we divided both sides by cosx and found ourself solving for where tanx=1. (I should have taken pictures, it was really neat work).

further to that, we looked at graphing tanx, a bit of an extension, but touches on periodic functions and reviews rational functions and identities which is always good to revisit. Again, there were so many interesting approaches, and strategies explored to end up with the graph for f(x)=tanx.

We’re going to work backwards next, starting with graphs and making equations. New challenges to explore tomorrow!