Ms. SritrakulAs many parents know (and hopefully all students!) I have been covering in the office since Mrs. Derbyshire has moved over to Robert Thirsk High school. In this time, we have tried to have substitute teachers in for stretches of time to gain consistency but I am now really excited that we have gotten Ms. Sritrakul to join our team for the remainder of our Chemistry Unit and beyond. Welcome Ms. Sritrakul! Field Trip FormsStudents have been given forms for Theatre Calgary and an intention form for Biogeosciences. If you have not yet returned the Theatre Calgary form, please do so. For Biogeosciences, the trip paperwork will come home to those that have paid the deposit or indicated their intent to attend the trip. This will happen over the next few weeks. In the interim, please ensure that the deposit has been sent in to the school or that we have received an indication that you are going to attend. There will be paperwork coming home for the Calgary Hitmen game that the school is going to attend at the end of February. The entire school is going to this event and the school has been given permission to shut down for the time that we are gone! This is a major event so please ensure that paperwork is returned promptly when it arrives home. Chemistry Anyone?
Powers and Exponent LawsWe are now over 1 week in to our powers and exponent laws unit and have gone through what a power is, base 10's and powers of 0, and the order of operations with powers. We will be discussing exponent laws next followed by perfect squares and square roots. Topics 1-3 of the attached textbook chapter have been covered and the next steps involve topics 4-6.
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Mathematics This past week, we worked on reviewing some of the concepts from our scale factor and enlargements and reductions unit. This was capped off by an assignment (that says unit exam) for the concepts. This assignment was based on past PAT questions and is due on Monday. For class 9A, we also started on reflectional symmetry and had a textbook assignment (pages 357-359) that we were to complete. 9E will take these notes and work on this early in the week between January 15-19. This week, we will look at rotational symmetry and order of rotation (How many times does a shape line up with itself when rotated a full 360 degrees? For each time it lines up, we increase it's order of rotation by 1. A shape that only overlaps after a full rotation is said to have no rotational symmetry (you can never have an order of rotation of 1)). We will also have a quiz on Thursday about symmetry and flips, slides, and rotations. Science To start the term, we reviewed mixtures (homogeneous and heterogeneous) with the class. We also outlined what a chemical and physical reaction are. We will perform a demo a day to determine if we have mastered what each thing is. This will be done for 10 days and will count as a quiz. To cap off the week, we worked on the history of the atom and atoms, compounds, and molecules. The Paper atoms, compounds, and molecules sheet is due on Monday. With the history of the atom, we are working on putting the history down in a creative way (memes, poems, tweets, texts, etc.) and will be presenting these on Tuesday. We will also be looking at the law of conservation of mass and the periodic table in the coming days. For the law of conservation of mass, we will need pop bottle (600 mL) with the caps. Anyone that has some of these, please bring them in.
Rational numbers is not finished! For that matter, no unit in math is ever finished as the concepts build upon each other. But, as we move forward in math, we are going to start to look at linear relations and graphing. To start with, this week we are going to look at deriving patterns from data. My son, who is now in grade 4, has looked for patterns for years and we are going to be no different. That said, our patterns will be numeric based and we are going to try and find short cuts to skip pattern numbers.
The file above, on the left, provides extra practice problems as well as some exemplars and skeleton notes. On the right is a copy of our textbook chapter as a reference.
As we move forward in math, we will quickly draw to an end on our rational numbers unit. This includes looking at what a rational number is, adding and subtracting rational numbers, multiplying and dividing rational numbers, and finally the order of operations. Throughout this entire unit, having and being able to utilize a calculator are key. If you do not have one, please make sure that you get and bring one in soon.
As a reference to where we are, students can go through work from pages 127-128 (multiplication) from the textbook chapter posted above.
With our biodiversity project underway, it's time to pay some attention to what has been going on in math. At the start of this year, we have been reviewing integers as a vehicle to our first unit on rational numbers. With that in mind, at the end of our first week we did a pre-assessment on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of positive and negative numbers that are whole or fractions. The interesting component to our course this year is the addition of a new section to the grade 9 mathematics PAT. This section, designed to emphasize mental mathematics, will highlight the importance of numeracy beyond technology. At the bottom of this post, I have posted an excerpt from the Alberta Government regarding the mathematics PAT. What are we doing this week?This week is seeing the start of our rational numbers unit. Because of this, we are going over positives and negatives, fractions and number lines, and decimals. I am a big advocate of working within your comfort zone and since students usually have a preference in terms of working with fractions or decimals, being able to convert between them is essential. With that in mind, if you are wondering what can be done to supplement the course at home, working on conversions and then adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing the converted numbers before converting them back is a great exercise. As an example: Additionally, below is a copy of the workbook for rational numbers. We will be utilizing some of the exercises in class but doing them before hand is fine as we can always supplement lessons with additional or alternative questions.
Alberta Education Excerpt on the Grade 9 Math PATAdditional Test Administration Information:
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Mr. GordonMath/ Science 9 Archives
June 2019
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