Ms. Bearse's Site

We have been practicing how to represent data in many ways.  For our practice investigation we looked at data given in a table, a graph and a paragraph.  We compared data by putting it all in the same format, and looking for trends

We are working on trigonometry, and have explored right angle triangles with a 30 degree angle.  We noticed that the sides of the triangles have consistent ratios.

Some of you asked if triangles that have angles other than 30 degrees have similar proportions.  Here’s a table of all of the ratios.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to memorize any of this.

trig tables (.pdf)

 Here’s your homework question.  Try it using the tables and also try it with your calculator.  Remember to put your calculator into degree mode.

In case you were wondering where I have been the past two days, I have been at a provincial math conference at St. Lawrence college.  We’ve been in session, doing math and hearing lots of math teachers and math experts telling us some new strategies.  We did some patterning, just like we’ve been doing in class.I got to hear some pretty inspiring speakers, who write blogs full of good ideas.

Ms. Farahani is here too.  Here she is, meeting a math celebrity, Dan Meyer.

He caused a lot of excitement before he spoke at the Grand Theatre.  There was a line to take selfies with him.

Here’s his info, if you want to see his math ideas

Marian Small told us all about how we can increase reasoning skills in our lessons.

And Gail Vaz-Oxlade, the host of ” ‘Til Debt Does Us Part” talked to us all about financial literacy.

The math continued on Saturday morning…..bring on the Alge-Tiles!

And Escher art

We went around Queen’s campus and measured some stairs.  These ones were on an old building, the Victoria school building main stairs.

We measured rise and run, and walked up the stairs to look down to see if it seemed steep.

We also looked at the stairs at Tindall field.

We measured the big stairs and also the small stairs, and compared the slopes.

Turns out that the steps are in proportion with each other.  3 little steps for each big step.  They have the same slope!  Look at those rulers.

We had fun, and enjoyed the spring weather, and now have a good idea of what slope, rise and run mean.

Our homework last night was to come up with figure 1,2,3 of a pattern.

We set up the room with a pattern per desk, and then we rotated around the stations determining the pattern rule: what the change is between figures, what stays the same each time, what figure 4 would be, what figure 0 would be, and whether it is linear or not.

We are working on expessing our understanding in so many ways.

Good work today!

We are working on problem solving, and showing complete, well communicated solutions. Today we had 6 groups set up each with a question on a chart paper.  We worked on whiteboards as a group to solve the problem, and communicated out answer fully on the chart paper with the marker colour we were given.  

We then brought our marker with us as we rotated to the next station, and we used it to add to the solution that was presented, or to highlight good parts of their answer.

We are working on making a list of things that are present in well communicated and well justified answers.

We explored some of the patterns at Visualpatterns.org and worked on extending the 3 terms by creating term 4,5 and jumping to fimd term 10.  We also worked backwards to term 0.  We made pictures and tables and graphs to determine if the growth patterns were linear or non linear.  Some of us worked on making equations for the growth we see in the patterns.

Some patterns were pretty tricky.

We had to look carefully to see how the pattern was growing.  Some grew in multiple places.

We looked for what didnt grow.  We coloured the constant bits blue.

We then looked for what was growing, and how.

We made an equation that was C=(n)(n+1)(2)+3 since each rectangle was going to have the dimensions of n by n+1 and there were always two rectangles, and the constant was 3 which had to be added on at the end.

This was pretty advanced for grade 9!  We did a good job today!

Grade 9 eqao is June 6/7 in class.  Grade 9 exam is June 22 at 8:30am

Grade 10 exam is June 22nd at noon