Math Curriculum Ideas Wanted

Our team is working on developing math curriculum units for grades 6, 7 and 8. Could any of you give us some suggestions on what we could include. The curriculum maps are in Google Drive and perhaps you could use the comment feature to give us some ideas. The links to specific grades and topics are below. So far we have mapped out the standards.

Sixth Grade Introductions to Rational Numbers

Seventh Grade Application of Proportional Relationships

Eighth Grade Geometry Linear Relationships

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We are using Holt McDougal textbook, among other resources.

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Permalink Reply by Des Howell on January 23, 2013 at 3:33pm

I am not familiar with the Holt McDougal textbook. The best textbook I ever used to teach maths focused on exploring the mathematical relationships of concrete situations that already made sense to students. The old rule of concrete to abstract worked very well.

To teach Rational Number ideas, may I suggest using a spreadsheet program to create number lines with positive and negative numbers? Spreadsheets are programs that can be basically used (a) like a piece of paper (b) like a hand-held-calculator and (c) like a simple programming language. If they can be used to teach something better than, say, using a piece of paper, then they should be the tool of choice.

For example, imagine a train that travels back and forth between two towns with stations equally spaced between. The town in the middle is Zerotown and the train passes through it at midday (Zerohour) . Times, distances and speeds in different directions are treated as positive and negative numbers. Explore the maths of this situation using your spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets, with their Autofill function, are ideal for creating negative as well as positive number lines to explore. They can help students visualize and investigate situations like the one described above. Tables where positive and negative numbers are used to obtain new values in "real" situations ( ones that make sense to students) can help them better understand abstractions like "multiplying two negatives to get a positive".