All resources in English Language Arts

Find the Missing Angle

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This task "Uses facts about supplementary, complementary, vertical, and adjacent angles in a multi-step problem to write and solve simple equations for an unknown angle in a figure (7.G.5)" except that it requires students to know, in addition, something about parallel lines, which students will not see until 8th grade.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

4.NBT Millions and Billions of People

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This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Historians estimate that there were about 7 million people on the earth in 4,000 BCE. Now there are about 7 billion! We write 7 million as 7,000,000. W...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

6.EE,NS,RP; 8.EE,F Pennies to heaven

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This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: A penny is about $\frac{1}{16}$ of an inch thick. In 2011 there were approximately 5 billion pennies minted. If all of these pennies were placed in a s...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Cell Phone Plans

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This task presents a real-world problem requiring the students to write linear equations to model different cell phone plans. Looking at the graphs of the lines in the context of the cell phone plans allows the students to connect the meaning of the intersection points of two lines with the simultaneous solution of two linear equations.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Planes and Wheat

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This is a simple exercise in creating equations from a situation with many variables. By giving three different scenarios, the problem requires students to keep going back to the definitions of the variables, thus emphasizing the importance of defining variables when you write an equation. In order to reinforce this aspect of the problem, the variables have not been given names that remind the student of what they stand for. The emphasis here is on setting up equations, not solving them.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Buttons: Statistical Questions

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Statistics is the study of variability. Students who understand statistics need to be able to identify and pose questions that can be answered by data that vary. The purpose of this task is to provide questions related to a particular context (a jar of buttons) so that students can identify which are statistical questions. The task also provides students with an opportunity to write a statistical question that pertains to the context.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

Comparing Freezing Points

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This task is appropriate for assessing student's understanding of differences of signed numbers. Because the task asks how many degrees the temperature drops, it is correct to say that "the temperature drops 61.5 degrees." However, some might think that the answer should be that the temperature is "changing -61.5" degrees. Having students write the answer in sentence form will allow teachers to interpret their response in a way that a purely numerical response would not.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

7.EE Ticket to Ride

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This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Malia is at an amusement park. She bought 14 tickets, and each ride requires 2 tickets. Write an expression that gives the number of tickets Malia has ...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

G-CO Defining Parallel Lines

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This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: Alex and his friends are studying for a geometry test and one of the main topics covered is parallel lines. They each write down what they think it mea...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics

N-CN Complex number patterns

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This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important asects of the task and its potential use. Here are the first few lines of the commentary for this task: For this task, the letter $i$ denotes the imaginary unit, that is, $i=\sqrt{-1}$. For each integer $k$ from 0 to 8, write $i^k$ in the form $a+bi$. Des...

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Illustrative Mathematics