In case you are trying the MARS MAP Classroom Challenges for the first time, it is recommended that you read the Brief Guide for teachers and administrators before you get started.
Before the lesson, students work on a task designed to reveal their current understandings and difficulties. You review their work and create questions for students to answer in order to improve their solutions.
A whole-class introduction provides students with guidance on how to work through the first task. Students then work in small groups on a collaborative discussion task, matching verbal interpretations with graphs. As they do this, they translate between words and graphical features, and begin to link the representations.
This is followed by a whole-class discussion about applying realistic data to a graph.
Students next work in small groups, matching tables of data to the existing matched pairs of cards. They then explain their reasoning to another group of students.
In a final whole-class discussion, students draw their own graphs from verbal interpretations.
Finally, students return to their original task and try to improve their individual responses.