Projectile Motion Posters

My Algebra 2 students always do much better when they are given lots of visual supports. I can relate; I love visuals too. 

A few years ago I decided to combine our graphing calculator unit with our quadratics unit into one huge learning curve. I joke that by the end of it my hair is more grey. But it's only half a joke!

This decision was made a year I didn't have enough graphing calculators to assign one to each student. But the next year when my classes were smaller I kept the units combined because of how much growth I saw in my students that first year. It was awesome and like magic. 

But we definitely need supports. I start our quadratic word problems unit by handing out this quadratic keywords sheet and making it into a poster for our word wall. The poster highlights the keywords for finding time to maximum, maximum height and the total time in air. 

i also made this Quadratic Keywords flipbook for student notebooks.

The "left bound right bound" poster above helps my students remember where to place their graphing calculator cursors to find zeros, but some of my students needed a little more. 

This maximum and zeros poster with the red and blue stars is the one we reference most when using the graphing calculator to find maximums and zeros. It's a permanent part of our word wall. 

Since we don't need to find the non-positive zeros in projectile motion problems, this visual gets right to the point. I made all of the posters in this post following these directions to make a poster, and they hang on our class word wall and on the front board. 

When we move onto rocket problems, the graphing calculator window soon becomes really important when finding maximums and the positive zero.

First, try ZOOM 6. If that doesn't work...

Ymax:

Try 10, then 100, then 1000, then 10000, then 15000, then 20000 until you see the top.

Xmax: 

Try 10, then 20, then 50, then 100, then 200 until you see the right zero.

This usually gets the entire parabola on the screen for the problems we have been working on.

To practice, I give the above projectile motion template as a warm-up (I give them a word problem with or without the equation). These warm ups can sometimes take up to 15 minutes for students to complete and offer super rich practice. 

I'm not a huge fan of tests, so I give the above quadratic task cards activity to gauge student understanding. 

I wrote more about the quadratics activities we do in class in the post Fun With Quadratics.