Ms. Bearse's Site

We made it to holidays!  Have a safe and happy break.  Remember exams come quickly when we get back.

A class tradition has become having a secret santa gift exchange before holidays.  The emphasis is on making our gifts.  This year there were some very creative presentations, songs, and artwork, baked goods, and inside jokes.  Many thanks to everyone for all the efforts and enthusiasm you brought to this tradition.

We made cookie houses this week and calculated the volume and surface area.

We also worked on making an icing recipe that would stick the houses together well.  We needed to adjust the proportions of sugar and water until it was just right.

Then we added the candy!

Take a sheet of paper and make a tube.  It can be done in two different ways….a tall thin tube, and a short wider tube.  Which one holds more popcorn?

We measuredwe calculatedthen we tested our theories

We brought mathmatical cheer to everyone this week through our math carolling.

Révision pour le test demain

Today we said goodbye to all the dried up bean plants…. We have a few that are still growing, but many are dead.

We opened up the beans to reveal the seeds….here are lots of tiny seeds.

Here’s a big kidney bean.  It’s not red yet, just a bit pinkish.

It’s amazing what has grown between the first day of school and now.  

We are getting pretty good at simplifying expressions and adding polynomials.  

We are using algetiles to help us visualize algebra.  The most important idea we have used is that a positive something and negative something cancel each other out to create zero.  So a small red square and small blue square cancel each other out.  A red rectangle and blue rectangle make 0. A big red square and big blue square cancel each other out as well.  

We made some pictures today and then took turns cancelling out red and blue tiles and then telling what the finished polynomial is.  This face is 2x^2 +3x-2

Some of the pictures were pretty cool!