Math News
by Sara Boden
December 07, 2018
The Glasco math classes are nearing the end of their first semester. These last few weeks typically move pretty quickly as the students finish up the last of this semester’s units and move onto their final exams. Final exams count as 20% of their semester grade, so there is quite a bit of pressure for them to do well.
At the beginning of the second quarter, the 7th Grade finished a unit on proportions and then applied that knowledge to cut recipes in half and into thirds. Once they were done cutting recipes down, they worked as a class to put together a cookbook. Their next unit is all about graphing. They will start out learning the basics of the coordinate plane, and by the end of the chapter, they will be finding slope and rate of change of graphed lines.
The 8th Grade did a short project over Tessellations. Tessellations are arrangements of shapes with no gaps or overlaps. For example, tiles on the floor would be considered a simple tessellation. The students were to create a complex shape to repeat and then color their pattern to make it look like a type of flower or animal. This led them into their current unit which covers the basics of geometry including angles, triangles, and transformations.
Tessellation by Bryson Schmidt Tessellation by Braya Darnall
Algebra I just started working with linear functions. They began the unit by learning to calculate rate of change and slope as well as graphing functions. Next, the students will move on to writing equations for functions and then round out the unit by graphing scatter plots and absolute value functions.
Geometry has been working hard on proofs, focusing primarily on proofs involving triangle congruency. Students typically struggle with proofs because they have to remember everything that has been taught this year in order to justify their statements. Geometry’s next unit focuses a little less on proofs and more on relationships within triangles. The students will be using mid-segments, bisectors, and medians to find missing side and angle measures.
Algebra II is finishing up a unit over quadratic functions and equations. In this unit, the students learned how to solve quadratic functions by factoring, completing the square, and using the quadratic formula. The end of the unit introduces complex numbers. We will follow up with polynomials and finding roots of polynomials.
