Middle Grades Math: Growing Patterns

Objectives

• Students will use symbols to represent unknowns and variables.
• Students will look for patterns and represent generalizations.
• Students will represent relationships among quantities using visual models, tables, graphs, and words.

Vocabulary

• function
• growth rate
• constant rate
• linear function

About the Lesson

This lesson involves using pattern growth to construct functions.
As a result, students will:

• Explore growing tile patterns pictorially, graphically and in tabular form.
• Examine the relationship between the stage number and the number of tiles.
• Determine a rule for the number of tiles as a function of the stage number.