WMS: Math Update: Tonight's homework and our present learning target

Dear Families,

First message: please don't let kids work for more than 45 minutes on the homework unless they are enjoying it and want to go on!

Whew! Now that that's out of the way, I wanted to email you because today we started our new learning target. 

Learning Target #4: I can write an equation to represent a set of data or a situation.

Today's lesson was built around Problem 3.1 in the book. It was challenging because it layered three different tasks into one. Here is the PROCESS that the lesson tried to help students walk through when writing an equation for a situation.

STEP 1: Describe the relationship between the independent and the dependent variables.

• For example, a car is going 50 MPH for 6 hours. We observe that as time goes up every hour, the distance the car has traveled goes up 50 miles. A student might wright, "for every hour the car travels, it covers 50 more miles of its trip."

STEP 2: Try to write that relationship in a way that uses adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing.

• For example, "the distance that car covered is the number of hours times 50."

STEP 3: Rewrite the relationship using math symbols. Replace words with letters.

• For our example car: d= nx50
• 'd' came replaces the word distance. 'n' replaces the words number of hours.

STEP 4: Something new for middle school! If you are multiplying a number times a letter, you can leave out the multiplication symbol and write the number and letter together (number first).

• The simplest form of our example equation would be 
  d= 50n

Tonight's homework is ACE questions 2-4 on page 55. I think that most students will do fine with the homework. But for students who are a little stuck, just remind them that the equations work like our algebra practice on the math reviews. If they replace the variable in the equation with a number, then they can just solve it and get an answer. 

I have posted the answers to the Problems and the ACE questions on my file website [link]. Students should feel free to look at these answers because sometimes they help the questions make more sense.

I hope you have a wonderful evening!

Sincerely,

Brian MacNevin