eMath February Newsletter

We’ve now moved past the mid-winter point (Groundhog’s Day) and are heading towards spring, even though our recent blizzards don’t make it seem that way. We’ve got some add-ons and some news here at eMATHinstruction, so let’s get to it.

For this month’s Common Core Algebra I Add-Ons we have three new additions. We start with a worksheet that gives students extra practice simplifying square roots. This is a nice worksheet if you just feel kids need extra practice on this skill. From there we move on to a Form B Formative Assessment for Unit 9 (Roots and Irrational Numbers). Our last add-on for the month is a mid-unit quiz for Unit 10 on Statistics.

We have some nice materials for our Common Core Algebra II Add-Ons this month. They are all about Unit 11 – The Circular Functions (i.e. the Trig Functions). First we bring you a mid-unit quiz that covers the first 5 lessons and will give teachers a good sense if students are understanding the basic concepts of these non-algebraic functions. Next we have a wonderful modeling activity where students use sinusoidal functions to model the length of daylight in both Poughkeepsie, New York, and Brisbane, Australia. This graphing activity uses the online graphing calculator Desmos, so there is no need for you to enter data by hand or into any calculators. Students just click on a link and are taken immediately to the data. Finally, we have a Form B Formative Assessment for Unit 11.

For the Algebra 2 and Trigonometry Add-Ons, we bring two solid Formative Unit Assessments. The first is for Unit 10 – Exponential and Logarithmic Functions. This is a challenging assessment that will really let teachers see how much students have learned about these challenging topics. We then bring you a Formative Assessment for Unit 11 – Probability. Students will be challenged to deal with combinations, permutations, and binomial probability. Fun!

Besides add-ons, we have news on other fronts. We have experienced a great deal of growth in our website traffic in the last year. So, in the next week we will be switching hosting services to one that can carry all of the traffic easily. That might cause a few hours of our site being out, but we will attempt to do that in the overnight hours on some weekend night when hopefully no one is actually using our site.

Common Core Geometry is coming along nicely. We are done with our first draft of the answer key, which also means we are done with our second round of editing on the book itself. We plan to have Common Core Geometry workbooks and answer key subscriptions ready for quote in mid-March and ready for sale around Memorial Day. We have just begun to work on the videos and will begin to release them as we get them done and edited.  We may be taking our time on these and because of that may not have the QR codes on the first edition of our workbooks. But, if that is the case, we will certainly publish a hyperlinked table of contents and will always have the links handy on our website.

We continue to work on a Spanish language version of Common Core Algebra I. We believe we will be ready to sell this for the 2017-2018 school year (it is done in its first draft).

Well, that’s about it for now. As always, contact us if you have suggestions for add-ons or if you have any questions. You can always reach me at: [email protected].