SOLs Covered: 7.NS.2 C&O Rat. Num.; 7.CE.1 Cont. Prob. with Rat. Num.; 7.PFA.2 Simplify Numerical Expressions
Math Topic: 03 C&O Rat. Num.; 04 Cont. Prob. Pt1 Rat. Num.; 05 Simplify Numerical Expressions
Daily Agenda: October 6-10, 2025
Upcoming Assessments: Topic 5 Formative (TBD); Unit 3 Expressions & Linear Equations (Fri. 11/7)
Good afternoon! I don't have a lot of new information to share as this week has been a lot of wrapping up the first quarter since the next topics carry over into the second quarter but that being said, I would like to start this update out by asking all parents and guardians to look at grades on ParentVUE, not just for my class but for all of them. The term ends officially on Wednesday, October 22nd, but I'm closing out grades next Friday, October 17th to allow time for grading and to make any final adjustments that might be needed.
To help ensure students end the first term as strongly as possible, I had them working on quiz corrections and missing work after the most recent unit quiz from Monday/Tuesday. I also made Wednesday a "catch up day" to allow students still needing a little extra time to finish the quiz to do so along with their surprise "pop quiz" (more on that to follow) and then the rest of the time could be used making up missing work for my class, redoing any assignment that was below a 100% to earn additional points, and correcting quizzes. If students had nothing they needed to work on for me, I allowed them to work on things for other classes that day as well. I will not be giving formal "extra credit" this year due to the fact that students can essentially redo/correct their work as many times as necessary and ultimately have the opportunity to earn a 100% from that alone.
In regards to the previously mentioned "pop quiz," the kids were given a short 7 (not 6) question "quiz" on a variety of math topics. The catch was that every problem had what has somehow become their collective favorite numbers, 6 and 7. They took various formats, sometimes it was just a plain 6 or 7 (ex. 6² = ? 7² = ?) other times they were used to form rational numbers (ex. 6/7, 67%, 6.7 × 10¹, etc.), but almost all of the questions connect back to all of the topics we covered so far this term (one was a "gimme" question as they just had to count the number of times "67" appeared in an image). Some kids thought I was "doing too much" as they like to say, but some absolutely loved it, one even saying it was the best day of his life! I've told them if they actually liked the concept behind the idea, I'll continue and have one each quarter.
The rest of the week was spent going over the order of operations, aka GEMDAS (my preferred form), aka PEMDAS, aka BIDMAS, etc. This is not a brand new concept as they first started learning it in 5th grade, but only using parenthesis as the grouping symbol (maximum of one set) and without any exponents. It's not formally part of the curriculum in 6th grade, but we did review what was taught in 5th when it could be utilized to help solve contextual problems (though most people do not usually set up and solve word problems as one long problem but instead break it down into parts). There's a big jump in difficulty as we add in extra grouping symbols and now have exponents to work with on top of the fact that it is a non-calculator standard. The kids have been doing well with it so far, but because the problems can be set up in a wide variety of ways and the state hasn't been very specific in what we can expect (outside of saying braces { } will not be used and that exponents will be limited to 1, 2, 3, and 4), we'll do one more day exclusively on this before moving onto the next part of the standard.
Well that should more than cover the week, so I'll close things out here. As always, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Hope everyone has a great weekend!