Thank you for a great year

Hello everyone,
Thank you for a super fabulous year.  Here is a link to our end of year picture video.  I had a great time being your teacher and getting to know all of you (parents included).  You worked hard and learned a lot, not just about math, but about each other and about our school.  You guys rock!  I am going to miss you and I hope you all come by and see me when you're 7th graders.  If you want to keep your math skills up over the summer check out this link.
Happy Summer Vacation!
Love, Mrs. Bird

The Algebra Tile

Parents (or students who are not quite sure what is up with the algebra tiles), I made a video that explains what each algebra tile represents and how to calculate perimeter and area of algebra tiles.  I hope this video will help you better understand what we are doing with the tiles in class. The video is located on the Math 6 Honors webpage under the VIDEO tutorials heading.

Opportunity for 6th through 8th grade girls

Simpson University is hosting a STEM conference on Saturday March 12 from 8am-2pm.  I will be attending.  Click the link here to register
Click the link here for the informational flyer
Registration deadline is February 24.

Areas, areas and more areas

This week we focused on finding the area of "L's" that is when two rectangles are connected.  We also learned how to find the area of parallelograms, triangles and trapezoids.  Check out the video tutorials I posted for trapezoids and triangles if you would like a refresher, or for parents, you can see how we have learned how to find the area of these shapes.
We have a test on Thursday.  It will mostly be review of previous chapters, but the new stuff on it will be to find the area of a triangle, the area of a parallelogram and the area of an "L" shape as well as to multiply two fractions.  Watching any of the tutorial videos from this webpage or going over the chapter 5 closure problems will be the best way to prepare for this test.

Regan figures out how to find the area of a trapezoid

These girls are busy cutting out trapezoids to see how they can be
rearranged into shapes that are parallelograms or rectangles
and triangles.

Cutting trapezoids so we can find their area.

Chase works several ideas in order to chop up his trapezoids.

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a wonderful time reconnecting with family and friends during the two weeks off together.  I had a wonderful time with my three boys.

This first week back we explored multiplying mixed fractions and why it is best to change them to "improper fractions" before multiplying them. (An improper fraction is a fraction with just a numerator a denominator.) We will continue to look at this and practice this week.  Check out the following videos to see how we are working these problems out in class.

Generic Rectangle
Change to improper fraction

Tallest Towers

Thank you everyone who donated supplies.  :-)

1st period Girls tower was 22 inches tall.

1st period also had another 22 inch tower, until it was
accidentally bumped into.  Here it is in the
building phase.

4th period Boys tower got to be 17 inches tall.

5th period tower got to be 28 inches tall.

7th period Boys got their tower to be 30.5 inches once they put that
plate on top.  The tower collapsed before we could get a picture
of the tower at it's tallest, but here it is in the building phase.

Algebra here we come!

Variables have entered our math the last couple of weeks.  Yep, math is now numbers and operational signs AND letters :-)

These boys show how they counted the number of tiles in this picture frame, without actually counting each tile.  This was our introduction to writing expressions like: 4(10) - 4 and 10+10+8+8.

Here we are finding out how many tiles would be in a square picture frame of ANY size.  We used a variable to represent the changing side length of the picture frame:  4(x) - 4 and x+x+x-2+x-2.