So... what exactly IS Grade 6 math about?

In a meeting this evening I became acutely aware that I had never written to let parents know about what topics are in Grade 6 Math at Whatcom Middle School. I apologize for this oversight. And I hope to fill you in (at least partly) in this blog post. How the class is organized and how students move between activities and subjects are topics that I will describe in a post on another day.

The Curriculum

As I shared in a previous post [link] our district uses the Connected Mathematics Project's curriculum for middle schools. But our state standards for Grade 6 [link] don't match the publisher's arrangement of these books (teachers say that a curriculum is aligned to the state standards when the topics match). So our district has rearranged some of the books to try and hit as many of the state standards for Grade 6 as possible. 

Bellingham's Alignment

In Grade 6, our district uses these books to teach toward the state standards:

• Bits and Pieces I (we're here now)
  Move among fractions, decimals, and percents; compare and order rational numbers; equivalence.
• Bits and Pieces II
  Understanding and skill with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions.
• Bits and Pieces III
  Understanding and skill with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of decimals, solving percent problems.
• Comparing and Scaling
  Rates and ratios; making comparisons; proportional reasoning; solving proportions.
• Covering and Surrounding
  Area and perimeter relationships, including minima and maxima; area and perimeter of polygons and circles, including formulas.
• Filling and Wrapping
  Spatial visualization, volume and surface area of various solids, volume and surface area relationship.
• Variables and Patterns
  Variables; representations of relationships, including tables, graphs, words, and symbols.

Students who have extra time by finishing a book early will get to work on:

• Samples and Populations
  Use samples to reason about populations and make predictions, compare samples and sample distributions, relationships among attributes in data sets.

So most of Grade 6 Math falls into two BIG categories: Proportional Reasoning (fractions and ratios); and Describing #D Solids (surface area and volume).