It’s not unusual for students to approach math teacher, Cindy Schacht, at the end of the school year looking for summer math work. Motivated by their own momentum in math, students often ask Cindy for suggestions on how to keep going over the summer months. Cindy recommends a range of options, from workbooks, to skill review, to special projects. We started the year off with a great example of a special project: One student took on the proportional expansion challenge and made a fork cake. She measured a standard kitchen fork and then enlarged the dimensions five times to create her fork cake. She discovered the effect of the expanding dimensions on surface area and volume: while the dimensions expanded five times, the surface area was 25 times bigger, and the volume was 125 times bigger. And certainly the cake was 150 times more delicious after all that work. Her classmates enjoyed it!

In in addition to algebra, seventh and eighth grade students will spend time in math class this year exploring geometry, creating math comics, practicing real-life budgeting, building probability games (for the Hyland Games), and making instructional math videos. 

And if you think that a fork cake is the only time that math is delicious, Cindy suggests you mark your calendar for Pi Day on March 14, 2017.