NPS MS Math Curriculum

The Newton Public Schools uses  the Desmos Math Curriculum as our core curriuclum in our middle schools.  The Desmos Math Curriculum is the "Desmofied" or highly interactive version of the Illustrative Math Curriculum.  

Details About Our Curriculum: Here is a General Desmos Parent Letter.  You can learn more about Desmos & try a lesson here. You can find detailed overviews of each unit of study by visiting the Illustrative Math Family Page for Grade 6, Grade 7, and Grade 8.  This program is based on the Common Core State Standards and the DESE Math Frameworks.  In 8th grade students go beyond the standards outlined by DESE as our 8th grade course also includes high school algebra one standards. 

Grade 6 Overview:

In Unit 1, students extend their knowledge of areas of rectangles to reason about areas of parallelograms and triangles, and to calculate surface areas. Unit 2 is students’ first formal introduction to ratios, a concept that they will revisit several times throughout the year and in later grades. Students learn several ways to represent ratios—with double number lines, tables, and tape diagrams, which they apply in Unit 3 to convert units, calculate unit rates, and solve problems with percentages. In Unit 4, students reason about two different strategies for dividing fractions and apply their strategies to calculate lengths, areas, and volumes. Unit 5 continues the theme of building on prior knowledge as students formalize strategies for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing decimals. Unit 6 returns to tape diagrams and introduces hanger diagrams as strategies for solving equations. Unit 6 also includes an introduction to exponents and reasoning about equivalent equations. Negative numbers on the number line and the coordinate plane are introduced in Unit 7. The year ends with students making sense of data in Unit 8, including measures of center and spread.

Grade 7 Overview:

Math 7 centers on understanding and applying proportional relationships. Students start by studying scale drawings in Unit 1, which sets up the introduction of proportional relationships in Unit 2. In Unit 3, students apply proportional relationships to understand the circumference and area of circles. Unit 4 invites students to use proportional relationships to solve problems involving fractional quantities and percent change. In Unit 5, students extend what they learned in Math 6 to add, subtract, multiply, and divide positive and negative numbers, which leads into work on expressions, equations, and inequalities in Unit 6. The year ends with geometry, probability, and statistics as students study angles, triangles, and prisms in Unit 7 and probability and sampling in Unit 8.

Grade 8 Overview:

Our 8th grade curriculum is a blend of Math 8 and High School Algebra 1.  Algebra 1 skills are weaved in through out the year and in a 9th unit at the end of the school year.  Math 8 builds on what students have learned about proportional and geometric relationships in Math 7 to develop several key concepts in algebra and geometry. Students start the year with rigid transformations and congruence in Unit 1, which sets them up to learn about similarity and dilations in Unit 2. Students use what they know about similar triangles to explore slope as they study linear relationships in Unit 3. This work with linear relationships builds toward solving linear equations with variables on both sides of the equal sign, and systems of linear equations in Unit 4. 

Unit 5 invites students to consider functions, specifically what makes a relationship a function. Unit 5 also explores the volumes of cylinders, cones, and spheres. Unit 6 returns to linear relationships as students explore bivariate data - both linear and nonlinear models. Unit 7 builds on the exponent work from Math 6 to explore properties of exponents and scientific notation as a tool for representing very large and very small quantities. In unit 8 students study Pythagorean theorem as students encounter square roots, cube roots, and irrational numbers for the first time.   

Additional and more in-depth study of algebra one topics occur through out the year and in a final unit of 8th grade.  Students do additional work with linear relationships including: writing equations in slope-intercept form from point and slope, and from 2 points, graphing from standard form, writing equations in point-slope form, graphing from point-slope form and converting between all forms of a linear relationship.  Students are introduced to function notation and take a deep dive into functions both linear and non-linear.  Additional time is spent solving equations with rational numbers and solving systems of equations using elimination, substitution and graphing.  

You can see/preview the entire Desmos Math Curriculum here.

You can also see this article: Desmos Is Also a Curriculum Company Now