Summer of Seventh Grade: Week 5

Even though he was at summer camp all last week, he crammed in a lot more learning and reading than I expected. While he was gone I enrolled in Stanford's EDUC115N : How To Learn Math and joined a local study group for the course which I'm really enjoying so far and can already see how it'll help as we go forward from here with math. This has a strong chance of being the first MOOC I actually complete!

DragonBox app
Cleared all levels in Chapter 4 of the DragonBox algebra app today, although some with fewer stars so I'll likely have him go back and revisit those levels in the week ahead.

Khan Academy 

No electronics at camp! 

Key to Algebra by Key Curriculum Press

Revisited the distributive property and found that both it and evaluating expressions with a combination of positive & negative numbers for the variables needs more review so we'll slow down that pace this week.

I also picked up the last (Book 4) of the Key to Fractions book for review and started in the middle with pages 18-19 with adding & subtracting mixed numbers with different denominators for more substantial hands-on work than Khan Academy can offer. I was reminded in my math class study group that students from the district are usually perceived as being weak on fractions so even though this isn't new material it does help to strengthen the concepts.

 

McDougal Littell Pre-Algebra textbook (2005)

Definitely none of this at summer camp, that thing weighs a ton!

Reading & Writing
He took The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey with him to summer camp because he left for it on a 50 nautical mile boat ride where he got to steer twice (really) and came home with 252 pages read. His days were completely packed with activities so my guess is he still woke up before everyone else, and he said he loved reading with his headlamp at night when he was supposed to be asleep sometimes too. That's our boy!