Happy Thanksgiving :)

Happy Thanksgiving! 

I am so thankful for the time I get to spend with my son this week, here he is giving his goofy smile :) 

This week the Course 2 students will be creating their own puzzle with fraction problems. They are spending Monday creating their own fraction problems and Tuesday creating the puzzle. 

When we get back from Thanksgiving break we will be focusing on rational numbers (fractions and decimals) with both positives and negatives. This is Topics 4 and 5 from Digits.

This week Course 3 students will be looking at what makes linear equations parallel or perpendicular. Tomorrow we will be beginning systems of equations which we will be continuing after Thanksgiving. 

Week of 11/7-11/12

I am so excited to be working with the course 2 students on integers (whole numbers and their opposites). We will be exploring integers by talking about Soup. I tell them that there is a magical soup where they can add "hot cubes" or "cold cubes" they use actual pieces of paper to represent these and perform addition or subtraction problems. This allows students to visually see the meaning behind the integer rules and hopefully they will have a better time remembering the rules. 

We will be working on subtraction on Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday students will be doing a graded worksheet with both addition and subtraction. 

I realize that this is a long time to be doing addition and subtraction but students must master this concept in order to be successful in the future. 

In course 3 we are starting Topic 5 linear equations. Student will be exploring y=mx form and how that relates to a table, graph and word problem. This is important for future lessons such as systems of equations and many lessons they will do next year.