In yesterday's post we looked at fractions, division, and ratios. If you missed the live stream of the answers, you can watch that here. Today we finish the first reporting category (section) of the 6th grade math curriculum, numerical representations and relationships, by looking at some concepts first learned in 5th grade.
Order of Operations
In 5th grade, students learned to interpret parentheses in expressions and to simplify expressions that do not involve exponents. In 6th grade, the gloves come off and students should expect to use the order of operations to generate equivalent expressions, including whole number exponents and prime factorization. The video below shows how that looks in 6th grade.
With that reminder, try this practice problem from a released STAAR test.
Prime Factorization
In 5th grade students first learned to classify numbers as either prime or composite based on the number of their factors. In 6th grade that knowledge is extended to explore prime factorization. Here's a refresher on that concept.
With that in mind, try this problem out to test your skill.
Generating Equivalent Expressions
A new concept for 6th graders is that they can create equivalent expressions by using different properties of operations. The first, and probably most important, property to learn is the distributive expression.
Hopefully that video helped clarify a few things. Now try this problem from a released STAAR test.
Another property that students should be familiar with is the commutative property. If that only sounds vaguely familiar, take a look at this video.
The commutative property is deceptively simple but essential to understand. Now that you know how it works, try this problem.
Correct Answers Tonight (4/15/20) at 8:00 pm (CDT), I'll live stream from my YouTube channel to go over the answers to these three practice problems. Make sure you've already worked them out ahead of time. I can answer questions you might have in the stream chat and I'll put the recording on my channel and in this post for anyone that couldn't watch it live.
If you haven't done so already, you can subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notifications for live streams and new videos that I post.
Here's the live stream with the answers and explanations.