Can you believe it’s been more than 5 years since we first released our AP Calculus lessons? Some of you have been with us since the beginning, going all in on the EFFL model and never looking back. We have so appreciated all the positive feedback about how your students are experiencing Calculus in a new way!
A lot has happened in the last five years. We completed the rest of the curriculum for ALL high school math courses, we merged Calc Medic into Math Medic, and oh yeah, we endured a global pandemic along with the rest of you. In addition to that, we’ve grown as educators, and we want our lessons to reflect it! While our current lessons have been very effective for our students, we recognize that there are always improvements that can help both students and teachers. Coming your way for the 2025-2026 school year are the Refreshed AP Calculus lessons, with perfect alignment to the AP Calc AB Course and Exam Description (CED). While some lessons are getting only minor tweaks, others are getting a major revamp.
So, what’s changing about the AP Calc lessons?
New Check Your Understanding questions that build a bridge between the questions in the Activity and AP-style questions
More comprehensive Activities, with more explicit connections to the learning targets
More lessons! Each new concept gets a full EFFL lesson (with plenty of review activities sprinkled in to deepen understanding and build fluency)
Updated contexts – we’ve traded out some previous contexts for ones we think will work better for students
Lesson numbers rather than topic numbers (making it super easy to know what comes next)
Easier to use for new AP Calc teachers
NEW approach to teaching limits (So excited about this one!)
Beautiful new graphs everywhere!
And you can be sure that one thing that's NOT changing is that lessons will continue to be free, available as editable handouts with answer keys and teaching tips.
We’ll be sharing a few of the new lessons throughout the spring, but you can expect the full set of updated lessons in August 2025. They will be available in the Math Medic Teacher Portal. (Yes, that also means the current lessons will be archived this summer. Download while you can, folks.)
Check out one of our new lessons!
Since it’s January and many of you are in Unit 6, we thought we would share a brand new lesson from this unit. This lesson is about justifying the behavior of accumulation functions (CED Topic 6.5), a lesson that previously DNE!
Activity: How Many Canoes Are Available?
Downloads:
In this lesson, students look at the number of canoes available at a canoe rental livery. Students are given a graph of R(t), which represents the rate of change of the number of canoes available. After first interpreting negative and positive values of R(t) in the context of the problem, students are asked to think about a new function C(x) that is defined as an accumulation function, with R(t) as the integrand.
At this point students already know that the area under a curve represents accumulation, so they begin by evaluating C(x) at a few values of x. They are able to identify that these values represent quantities of canoes available at various times. Students also know that function behavior like intervals of increasing/decreasing, relative extrema, and concavity can be determined from the derivative of the function. The point then, is to connect the derivative of C to the function shown in the graph, R. Luckily, using a real-world context here makes this an easy-peasy connection. The derivative is a rate of change with units given by “canoes per hour”, which is exactly what was represented by the original graph. (The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is also a huge help here of course, and students will have discovered this on the previous day’s “Under Cover” lesson.)
The margin notes show students exactly what is needed to properly justify the behavior of an accumulation function, making an explicit connection between the derivative of the accumulation function and the rate of change graph given.
This topic shows up very regularly on the AP Calculus Exam, specifically in the “Graph Analysis” FRQ. We know this new lesson will be a big help to students!
We can’t wait to share the full set of lessons with you this summer. As always, each lesson is FREE and will come with a quick lesson plan, learning targets, a description of the lesson with teacher notes, student handouts, and a color-coded teacher answer key!