SOLs Covered: 7.NS.1 Powers of Ten & Scientific Notation; 7.NS.2 Compare & Order Rational Numbers
Math Topic: 02 Powers of Ten & Scientific Notation; 03 Compare & Order Rational Numbers
Daily Agenda: September 22-25, 2026
Upcoming Assessments: Unit 2 Real & Rational Numbers (Tues. 10/6)
Greetings! I still have quite a bit to do before I can call this work week complete, so I'm going to try to keep this update short. We've officially hit the halfway mark for the first term, so I spent quite a bit of time working with the students on getting fully caught up and even turned Thursday into a "catchup day," giving the students time to fix any work that didn't earn a 100%, turn in missing work, and wrap up the test as needed. That being said, please help us out by looking over their grades on ParentVUE/StudentVUE. For my class, if you see they do not currently have a 100%, please encourage them to handle any individual task that scored below that as even the test should be a 100% after we went over the whole thing together in class last week. While I always hope for the best grades possible, I do not usually have the expectation that all students have a 100% but with all the extra support provided on the work at this point, there is no viable reason for a student to have less than that at this time.
When we did focus on new math concepts for the week, the individual components were not new as we are working on comparing and ordering rational numbers, all of which the students have worked with in the past. The concept is advanced at this stage by throwing them (fractions, decimals, percents, integers/negatives, and scientific notation) together. This has been a bit more difficult than the students expected, but this is in part due to some mathematical misconceptions the students have from early years of math. For example, many of the students believe that the longer a number is, the greater it is, but this "trick" doesn't hold true past early elementary school. Place value matters as well as a number's sign; a longer decimal isn't automatically greater (ex. 0.00005 is not greater than 0.1) and negatives are opposite positives (ex. -100 is less than both -1 and 1). An added struggle for the kids is that we are also giving them negative fractions, decimals, and percents at this stage, which further complicates things. For this reason as well as the need to give students some catchup time this week, we'll carry over our work from this week into Monday before we move onto the next element, rational number word problems.
Well, this has already gotten away from me and I still have quite a bit to do before I leave, so I'll wrap things up here. As always, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns. I hope everyone has an amazing weekend!