6th Grade Math Summer Camp: Pre-Algebra, Ratios and Geometry Focused - Excel!

Students will be taught strategies that develop true, deep understanding of the concepts introduced during camp. Your student can attend a single week or any combination of weeks. Content will be chunked so that every week students can either start new or continue from previous weeks.  At the end of each week students will be given a handout to help remind them of the major ideas presented for the week!

Each week I will tailor the content to student interests by giving them a short survey at the beginning of the first day. I will then use the responses when finalizing 'real-world' contexts for the week to come! Our discussions will be interactive and all students will be encouraged, but not required, to ask questions and answer prompts throughout the hour. I believe that I can help students the most when I see their work and hear their thinking; so showing their thinking is imperative. But this does not mean that there is only one way to arrive at an answer! We learn from each other as we explain what our process is. 

Week 2 & 4
- Understand ratio concepts and use ratio reasoning to solve problems
- Understand unit rate and ratio relationships
- Find a percent of a quantity and solve problems involving finding the whole given a part and the percent
- Interpret and compute fraction division
- Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals
- Find greatest common factors and least common denominators of two whole numbers

Week 1, 3 & 6
- Understand exponents
- Work with algebraic expressions (using variables in place of numbers)
- Write and evaluate expressions at specific variable values
- Understand solving an equation or inequality as a process of answering a question: which values?
- Write expression and equations to solve real-world problems
- Write algebraic inequalities and use number line diagrams
- Analyze dependent vs independent variables and describe their relationship

Week 5
- Work with area of triangles and other polygons
- Find volume and surface area of prisms
- Draw polygons on the coordinate plane

Class is discussion based but we will also refer to the Desmos graphing calculator occasionally during class. Desmos provides an online, interactive way for students to see math that is hard to conceptualize with just paper and pencil explanations. 

All students entering this class should have a basic understanding of fifth grade math standards. In particular, they should have some fraction sense and knowledge of whole number factors and multiples. No in-depth algebra knowledge is needed to enter this camp. Students should also be familiar with their basic two dimensional shapes and a coordinate plane.