Curriculum Overview-6th Grade Math

The investigative approach to this material will lend to a deeper understanding of concepts that are building blocks for success in Algebra and higher level courses. Throughout the year, we will be spiraling with our basic skills, through Weekly Review and Mini-Quizzes.

Trimester 1 begins half way through the 1st unit, "Prime Time."  (The first half was done at the end of 5th Grade). We will start with properties of whole numbers, especially related to multiplying and dividing.  Students will review  common factors and multiples, distributive property and order of operations.  They will discover key properties of numbers and use them to solve problems.  We then move onto our 2nd unit, "Comparing Bits and Pieces."  In this unit, students will deepen their knowledge of and comfort with fractions and build understandings of ratio for use in later units and grades. They will learn to recognize fraction and decimals as numbers that can be located on the number line as well as compared, counted, partitioned and decomposed.  Students will recognize ratios as comparisons of two numbers. They will also recognize equivalence of fractions and ratios, and the use of equivalence to solve problems.  We will then wind down the trimester beginning in our 3rd unit, "Let's Be Rational."  In this unit, students will focus on understanding and developing systematic ways to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. While working in this unit, students will investigate many interesting problem situations that help them to develop algorithms for fraction computation. In addition students will use number sense, benchmarks, and operation sense to estimate solutions, helping them decide if exact answers are reasonable. The investigative approach to this material will lend to a deeper understanding of concepts that are building blocks for success in Algebra and higher level courses. Throughout each trimester, we will be spiraling our basic skills through Weekly Reviews and Review Quizzes. 

Trimester 2   continues with "Let's Be Rational." We then move into "Variables and Patterns." The goals of this unit are to identify variables and relationships in problem situations and describe patterns of change in words, data tables, graphs and equations.  Students will use data tables, graphs and equations to solve problems. We explore algebraic connections with real world examples.  Our next unit, "Decimal Ops" works to develop and work with algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing with decimal numbers.  This will carry over into applications with percents, discount, tax and tip.  

Trimester 3  begins with an understanding of measurement, which includes perimeter, area, surface area and volume. We will also apply these concepts to algebraic work with formulas.   The trimester also includes working with data. This includes constructing line plots, frequency tables, bar graphs and histograms as well as box-and-whiskers plots. Students will interpret patterns that they see.  They will also learn to compute mean, mode, median, range, interquartile range and the mean absolute deviation of data. Students will use the statistics to describe data and make predictions.  We will end the year with our Integer Unit.  In this unit we will develop an understanding of the set of integers including the concept of absolute value.  We will add, subtract, multiply and divide integers along with comparing them.