math

A great activity I recently did with my son was a "life-line":

1. Take some letter sized printer paper and cut it in half (length wise). The child can do the cutting to practice their cutting skills with scissors.

2. Then tape the pieces together lengthwise to create a long strip of paper. We used a total of two pieces of paper (4 strips taped together) for my 5 year old son's life line, and three pieces of paper (6 strips taped together) for my life line (I'm a bit older than 5 so my life line had more going on than my son's).

3. Then, draw a long line down the centre of the long paper strip.

4. Label 0 at one end (to mark your child's birth) and your child's age on the other end (to mark how old he/she is now). Fill in the rest of the number line with all the years that are missing.

5. Then the fun part begins. You get to tell your child when they first talked, first walked. What major events happened in their lives, such as moving, going to preschool, learning to swim etc. For each event draw (or get your child to draw) a little picture to represent the event. My son also asked me to draw birthday cakes to represent each birthday (with the right amount of candles on each cake). He also asked me to remind him when he started to like dinosaurs, which colours he liked at what ages, etc.

This test is a grade 10 pure math test on rational expressions.

It includes questions on:

- reducing rational expressions
- adding and subtracting rational expressions
- multiplying and dividing rational expressions
- solving rational equations

It is a challenging test, but doesn't have any applications. It is pure algebra.

Attached is the test in pdf format.

This is a polynomials test specifically for grade 10 pure math. There is some simplifying monomials and binomials, some expanding questions, but mostly it's about factoring. No word problems, just dry (and fun for me) algebra.

The test is attached in pdf format.

This test is made for grade 10 pure math. It is a very straight forward polynomial test with simmplifying monomials, expanding polynomials, multiplying, dividing, and most of all factoring. There are also questions on solving quadratic equations using factoring, and a long division question.

Very good test, but all math, no word problems at all. (Attached in pdf format.)

We were playing Settlers of Catan the other day. If you don't know it, you should immediately go out and buy it, because it is a fantastic game... one of the best strategy / board games ever. But back to my topic... The game relies on die randomness. From basic math / probability, we know that when rolling two dice, the sum of 7 has the highest probability of getting rolled. Next, the sums of 6 and 8 would have the next best chance. More importantly, the 6 and the 8 would have equal chance of getting rolled. Then 5 and 9 and so on. This is easily shown with a table (sample space) displaying all the possible outcomes of rolling two dice and then counting the number of possible outcomes of getting a sum of 7, sum of 6, sum of 8 etc.

But when we were playing our board game, it seemed that these random rules didn't apply all that well. The higher numbers seemed to come up way more than the lower ones. For instance 9 came up way more than 5. First we thought that our dies are not well balanced, so we traded them from a set from Monopoly, but the same trend continued. Unhappy with this (I lost the game because I chose lower numbers in Settlers and they hardly came up) I decided to look into this more.

This is a test for grade 10 - functions and relations. It contains questions on:

• difference between function and relation

• changing a rule defined in a sentence into a table of values, ordered pairs, an equation, graph
• figuring out the equation relation for a table of values set of numbers
• finding the domain and range of a function/relation
• word problems
• function notation
• figuring out whether a relation is a function

Attached is the test in pdf format. Have a look and use any questions you wish.

The test attached is for Pure Math 10 - the real numbers unit. It contains questions pertaining to the following topics:

• simplifying radical (square root) numbers
• evaluating numbers with rational exponents
• differentiating between rational and irrational numbers
• rationalizing the denominator
• multiplying and dividing radicals
• adding and subtracting radicals
• simplifying radical expressions

Here is a test I used for the sequences and series unit in Pure Math 10. It includes:

• comparing arithmetic and geometric sequences
• finding next terms
• determining first five terms in sequence given two random terms
• finding a large term
• finding which term in the sequence is the particular term
• find the sum of the first 25 terms
• find the sum of a series with a given first three terms and a last term
• applications of series: interest rate, loans, deprieciation
• applications: changing CAN dollars to US dollars, shopping with discounts and taxes

This assignment is a cumulative assignment for the geometry unit in grade 9. It has a lot of proofs, some geometrical constructions and other trigonometry questions.

This 10 - 15 minute quiz has a question on trigonometry, exponents, polynomial recognition, factoring and a 3-d volume question.