New Websites

I have been having problems using the school website so I decided to move everything to Wix, a fress website host.  I created two new sites, a teacher page and a Washington DC trip page.  Here are the links:

Teacher page:  http://jnash03.wix.com/mpmspreapmath

DC Page:  http://jnash03.wix.com/mpmsdc

Week of April 27th

Well, the good thing about this week, STAAR is over for the 7th graders.  So now it is time to have some fun with math.  This week will begin a unit on right triangles.  We will start with the Pythagorean Theorem, then move on to special right triangles, and then to trig ratios.  It is going to be fun.  Most of the lessons will take two days, one day for the lesson and one day for the assignment.

If you would like to read up on a few of the topics here are some links.

- Pythagorean Theorem

- Special Right Triangles

- Trig Ratios


Bonus Question of the Week:

A baseball diamond is a square with sides of 90 feet. What is the shortest distance, to the nearest tenth of a foot, between first base and third base?

StraightAce.com

Today, in class we began something something new. Each student created an account on the StraightAce Supplemental Learning System.  The StraightAce eLearning system provides supplementary learning material for 6th, 7th and 8th grade math and ELA, along with brand-new 3rd, 4th and 5th grade content. With a comprehensive library of topics, StraightAce helps you manage homework assignments, practice quizzes, extra credit problems, and more!

Each of my students have access to 7th grade math, 8th grade math, and the State Test Prep material.  It is a great tool for some additional problem solving practice at school or at home.  The web address to access the material is

https://student.straightace.com

Here are some example questions.

Proportionality Review

Last week we began reviewing some topics that we have already covered but I feel we need another dose of before we take the 7th grade STAAR test on April 21st.  The first topic is proportionality.  This is one of the most helpful tools in mathematics.  We use proportions everywhere, in recipes, house plans, looking at student to professor ratios in colleges, baseball averages, etc.  We see proportions everywhere.

We began by reviewing how to determine if two ratios make a proportion.  If you find the cross products of the two ratios and they are equal your ratios make a proportion, if they don't they do not make a proportion.

ex.

Next, we looked at similar figures.  Similar figures have 4 characteristics that we must know:

1. They are the same shape,

2. They  are different sizes,

3. Their corresponding angles are congruent and,

4. Their corresponding sides are proportional.

With similar figures you have to be able to determine if 2 shapes are similar and if the shapes are similar find a missing part.

ex.

The third topic we discussed is the percent proportion.  You can use this proportion to solve almost every percent problem given.

  %   =   part  

100      total

There are 3 types of percent problems.  Problems where the part is missing, the total is missing, and the percent is missing.

Each one of these problems can be worked with the percent proportion.

The first problem sets up like this:

The second problem

The third problem