Wow, it's been over a week since I've been here! Time is flying by way too fast. I wish I could say that we've been out having tons of summer fun, but it has been very hot here and when it isn't hot, the mosquitoes have been so bad that it takes all the fun out of being outside.
Last weekend we did venture out to our annual Cast and Crew party for the Girls Club that our girls are in. It was great fun as always. We watched the girls dance and perform some skits, played some games (including moms jumping rope and dads hula-hooping) and ate lots of good food.
Mr. 9 yo became Mr 10 yo this past week. He was very excited to finally enter into the double digit mode!
We've been busy with our various business ventures, too. We're still working on getting up a website for our soap and I just finished my next Catholic unit study on St. Ignatius. The Farmer's Market is going well and we are still really enjoying it!
Tomorrow night we have a wedding to attend. Thankfully the church is air conditioned but the reception is going to be outside. We're praying hard for a nice breeze to cool things off and drive the mosquitoes away.
Yes, thoughts of school keep popping into my head. The older girls are set on their classes so they will be starting soon. Now that I've finished St. Ignatius, we can get started soon, too. That is going to be our main focus (okay, besides math) for the first month of our school year. We also got our books for the big county fair that is near our house. It occurs during the week of Labor Day and every year we all try to enter a few projects. It is a great time - both educational and enjoyable - just the way school should be!
Hope your summer is wrapping up on a good note.
Yesterday my husband, daughter and I went to her new college for orientation day. What an incredible difference from when my husband and I went to school! Let's see, when we went to school it went something like this:
1. Decide to go to big state university
2. Get accepted to big state university
3. Get moved into dorm room by parents a few days before classes start.
4. Figure out who your roommate is, how to buy books, where to buy books, navigate through all the ins and outs of being away from home, etc. ALL BY YOURSELF. Maybe if you were lucky enough to have an older friend or an RA who was helpful, you might have had some guidance.
Nowadays, what a difference. We had talks yesterday that were about commuter life, student life, academic life, how the business office works, what technology is like on campus, how to support a successful college student, as well as breakfast, lunch and a dessert buffet at the end of the day!
The students had many of the same talks, but were also able to meet with their advisor (I don't even know if I had one of those in college), figure out their schedule and then learn how to use the computer system to register.
I understand that this is pretty common at colleges now. I haven't heard about the universities, though. How do they pull off such in-depth orientations for 50,000 students? Ms. 18 yo is in the biggest class so far at the college - about 600 students.
I have been freaking the kids out, however, when I tell them that I was 18 when I met their father. "You never know," I tell them, "your sister may be months away from meeting her future husband!" I love watching them look horrified!!!
Since this has been a promotional week, I might as well end it by pointing out that I've added a new page to my blog. See that new page heading up above? The one that says Homeschooling Unit Studies?
Check it out, and if you wouldn't mind, please pray for me as I try to finish up my next unit study on St. Ignatius and the Renaissance Era.
July 31st is the Feast Day of this great Saint!
St. Ignatius, pray for us!
Calculus, the one word in math that strikes fear in the hearts of teachers and students alike! I have to admit that we haven't ventured into the realm of Calculus yet, but if this book is like the others in the math series, I'm sure it will be just as much fun and just as thorough!
In the introduction, the author describes calculus as such:
"The book you now hold in your hands shows that every aspect of calculus can arise in the course of daily living. If you've ever fallen into a vat of cheese soup (Chapter 19) or tried to run a thousand pounds of ammo through a custom's station (Chapter 9) you know what I mean.
So what is calculus? In a sentence: if it moves at a varying speed, if it has a curvy shape, if it has a maximum that you'd like to find, if it involves adding up an infinite number of terms, then you're probably looking at calculus."
This book is divided up into 24 chapters, with a section at the back entitled "Further Ado", which delves deeper into certain calculus topics. The main chapters cover things like, functions, speed, derivatives, curvature, logs, series, polar coordinates, vectors and differential equations, plus much more. This is truly a thorough covering of Calculus!
Hope you've enjoyed taking a look into all these great math books, and I hope you learned a little something along the way. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about the Life of Fred, I'd be happy to help you out.
Here are the answers to the Geometry questions from the previous post. They weren't too hard, so hopefully you got them both right!
Sure. In fact, if it had one right angle, it would have to have two of them. Otherwise none of the sides would he parallel.
Here we get into a bit of difficulty. I can't see how to draw that. When I try, I obtain a rectangle. Then both pairs of opposite sides are parallel and I no longer have a trapezoid.
The next book in line is Life of Fred Trigonometry. What is trigonometry, you ask? The author states the following about trig at the beginning of the book,
"Trigonometry plays with triangles. Mostly right triangles. Trigon means triangle and metry means measuring (in Greek). someone probably stuck the "o" in trigon-o-metry to make it easier to pronounce."
There are 10 chapters on Trig covering things like: sine, cosine, tangent, trig functions, radians, oblique triangles and much more.
There are also 6 "Looking Back" chapters that cover things that the student has learned previously.
In this book, there is also one "Looking Forward" chapter at the end of the book which looks ahead to Calculus.
Overall, there is a very thorough coverage of trigonometry as well as other things, like Shakespeare, saltimbocca and boxing.
The Trig book also comes with a Home Companion book that breaks all of the chapters up into 94 daily lesson plans. Since this book might not take you an entire year to complete, you can always start the Calculus book early since there are 24 chapters in that book!
Sorry, no questions today, as it is getting more difficult to find questions and answers that I can actually type into this box and have them come out right! You'll just have to take my word for it: If you're ready for Trig, this is an excellent book to get!
We are almost there! Today's review is on the Life of Fred Geometry book. But first, here are the answers from Advanced Algebra:
f(3)=2(3) + 7 = 13
(x - 5)2 + (y - 88)2 = 144
In the introduction to Geometry, the author states,
"In the usual sequence of the study of mathematics...there is one course that is different from all the rest. In five out of the six courses, the emphasis is on calculating, manipulating and computing answers...In contrast, in geometry there are proofs to be created. It is much more like solving puzzles than grinding out numerical answers...Things in geometry are much more creative than in the other five courses."
I really liked Geometry when I took it in high school, however I will admit that 25+ years later I didn't really remember that much. Thus, we had to pull in outside resources to help my daughter get through this class!
The Life of Fred Geometry book has 13 full chapters and 6 - 1/2 chapters. The full chapters cover things like points, lines, angles, quadrilaterals, area, triangles, solid geometry and coordinate geometry to name some of them. The 1/2 chapters explore other areas of Geometry and can be skipped if the student wants to stick to "just the basics".
Here are two simple problems from the chapter on Quadrilaterals:
Can a trapezoid ever have a right angle?
Can an isosceles trapezoid ever have a right angle?
I hope you all had a very nice weekend. Now, it is back to math :) Here are the answers from the previous post on Beginning Algebra.
(x + 3)(x + 7)
There is a common factor involved. x3 - 18x2 - 40 x = x(x2 - 18x - 40) Now to find the two numbers that multiply to -40 and add to -18. They are -20 and +2. So the original equation factors into x(x - 20)(x + 2).
The first step in solving a quadratic equation by factoring is to put everything on one side of the equation. this has already been done. To factor the original equation we get (x + 3)(x + 8) = 0. Now if two numbers multiply to zero, then one of them has to be zero. so x + 3 = 0 OR x + 8 = 0. Then x = -3 OR x = -8.
I'm never quite sure which book comes next since I've seen it done both ways. Is it Advanced Algebra or Geometry????? For this post I am going to talk about the Advanced Algebra book next because that is the one I picked up (although that is the order that we've done them in.)
The Advanced Algebra book also comes with a Home Companion book that lays out the entire main book into a daily lesson plan format. This book has 10 chapters and is divided into 101 daily lessons which cover some pretty intense Algebra. Things like: radicals, logarithms, graphing, systems of equations, more factoring, linear programming, sequences, permutations and much more.
The book ends with a section entitled, "The Hardest Problem in Advanced Algebra". It also has "Looking Back" chapters that take some time to go back and revisit topics from Beginning Algebra. The chapters are numbered as 1/2 chapters, so I guess that, technically speaking, there are more than 10 chapters.
Due to my limited knowledge of how to code things properly, I am somewhat limited to the types of problems I can put up here since many of them involve square roots and graphs and complex fractions and I'm not sure how to get those to look the right way. I have, however, found a few function problems which do not require anything too complex, so here goes:
Let function f by given by the rule f(x) = 2x + 7. The domain and co-domain are the real numbers. What would f(3) equal?
What is the equation of the circle whose center is (5, 88) and whose radius is 12?
