6th Grade

We are lucky enough to have purchased a new math curriculum for the middle grades this year. It is published by Glencoe and is known as MathConnects. We did an extensive pilot last year and a review of the Washington state math standards, and chose this program as best meeting state requirements and the needs of our students. Something new to us with this adoption is that each textbook comes with a student CD - so families have the choice of checking out a textbook OR a CD to use for the year. You don't need to have internet access to use the CD, but it does have internet links for homework help sites.

Link to online student edition: http://www.glencoe.com/ose (the student access code is B9D191D994)

What will we be learning this year?

We will be covering 4 “Big Ideas” this year:

· Number and Operations: We will be learning about prime and composite numbers, even and odds, factors, multiples and how we use those in "real life." We will be introduced to Order of Operations as well as using a variable in an expression. We will continue to practice adding and subtracting decimals and fractions, and learn how to multiply and divide.

· Patterns, Relationships and Algebraic Thinking: Understanding, comparing and applying ratios, rates, and proportions. Calculating and using percents and probability.

· Measurement and Geometry: Calculating perimeter and area of rectangles, parallelograms and triangles, circumference and area of circles, surface area and volume of rectangular prisms.

· Number, Operations and Algebraic Thinking: Ordering and performing operations with signed integers. Using the distributive property, simplifying expressions. Solving one-step equations for the unknown quantity.