6th grade has been making connections between decimals, fractions and percents. One of the visual tools we use is a percent ruler (pictured below). As a family, work together to decide the amount to leave for a tip at a restaurant or the reduced price of something on sale. 7th grade has been using algebra tiles to enhance their understanding of the distributive property and the importance of keeping equations balanced while solving for a variable. 8th grade has been using algebra tiles and generic rectangles to multiply binomials. If you are interested in information about visual mathematics click on the link to an article by Jo Boaler and colleagues from Stanford University titled The Importance of Visual Mathematics for our Brain and Learning.
Our recent core concepts have been: Investigating the distributive property while using generic rectangles to multiply and working with multiple representations of a portion (6th grade); solving equations, checking solutions and seeing growth in different representations (7th grade); simplifying exponential expressions and solving equations with multiplication and absolute value (8th grade). Upcoming content can be found on the Middle School Math Syllabus 2019-2020 .
If you were to peek into our classrooms you would see students embracing productive struggle and celebrating perseverance while engaging in discussions around math. Many parents have expressed that math class looks different than when they were in middle school. Here are some demonstration videos made by students to give you a glimpse into some of those changes. Your child has a folder in their google drive titled math videos that houses videos created by them.
Generic Rectangles (6th grade)
Simplify Expressions using Algebra Tiles (7th grade)
We welcome any and all feedback. jpratt@lymeschool.org, smerrill@lymeschool.org, mnovick@lymeschool.org