Friday, April 19, 2013

Weekly Class Summary: April 15-19

SOLs Covered: 7.9&10 & 8.12 Probability
Math Dictionary Sections: (44) Probability
Upcoming Assessments: Test 4.1 (Thurs. 4/25); SOL Mini Quiz #1 (Fri. 4/26)

As evidenced by the thick coat of yellow pollen on everything outside, it's spring allergy season here and it's wrecking havic on my head at the moment, so I'm going to keep things short-and-sweet this week.  Students wrapped up the graphing quiz as needed Monday and overall scores were pretty good this time around.  Students have the same opportunity with this quiz to complete an error analysis within the first week (through April 24th) to earn full credit, but no later than the second week (through May 1st) to earn back half credit; students will only be able to earn back credit after that if they "buy" the opportunity using their Liberty or Lambie Points.

Probability Practice from SliderMath.com
Most of the week was devoted to one of my favorite units of the year, probability.  We reviewed the basics of finding the probability of simple (one thing happening) and compound (one thing or another happening) events before delving into independent and dependent events, which were first covered in Math 6.  We spent extra time talking about the SOL "word twists" that can be added to a problem that decide whether the question is about independent events (with replacement) or dependent events (without replacement or simultaneously).  Students took the quiz Friday, which was a bit easier than what they've been having as next week will be the start of our SOL prep quizzes along with the last unit test.  Once all quizzes were finished, I introduced the students to the game SKUNK, a dice game where rolling a one is a dreaded event (looses all points for the round), rolling double ones ("snake eyes") means disaster to your score (looses all points for the game so far), and highest score at the end of the game wins.  The kids really got into it and many said they plan on teaching their family so they can play at home!

Basic Probability Video from Shmoop

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