We have several exciting Math events coming up in the month of November, which will all benefit from your and your families’ participation!
The Math Festival will take place on Saturday, Nov 4, along the Open House, from 10 am – 12pm. This is a great event to dive into interesting math activities and problems, and socialize with other Acera and prospective families. We typically run about 10 Math activities throughout the entire building, and there will be something of interest to students (and their adults) at any grade level. These activities are not only fun for the festival visitors, but also those who facilitate them. Please let me know if you’d like to volunteer to run (or help run) an activity. Your help is very much appreciated, and will make the festival all the much better!
Fall Math Contests will take place on Wednesday, Nov 8 (AMC 10A) and Tuesday, Nov 14 (Noetic, AMC 12B). We host math contests at Acera to give our students an opportunity to engage with challenging non-routine problems, which frequently require creative approaches while applying the concepts and skills students have learned from their classes. Many of our students get excited about such opportunities, and find joy in the challenge. We celebrate all students who decide to participate in math contests, and invite everyone to consider trying it out for themselves. That said, this is completely voluntary, and some of our students choose to not take part, and instead spend the math block taken up by the contests playing fun math games.
- The Noetic is an elementary and middle school contest, for separate grades 2-8. This is our most popular contest, and a great first contest for those who haven’t participated in any yet.
- AMC 10 covers high-school math content at and below 10th grade level, while AMC 12 covers all of high school math. The AMC’s are quite challenging, and I wouldn’t recommend students to sign up for AMC 10 without having completed Algebra 1, and for AMC 12 without having completed HS Geometry. The AoPS website has past AMC 10 and AMC 12 tests and solutions, in case you and your children would like to take a look and try them out.
- As we have a few students who might be interested in participating in both AMC 10 and AMC 12, or Noetic and AMC 10, we will be hosting AMC 10A on the earlier date, Nov 8, while the Noetic and AMC 12B will happen on the later date, Nov 14 (the A and B indicate different dates, not difference in levels – AMC 10A and AMC 10B are at the same level, and so are AMC 12A and AMC 12B – to give flexibility of hosting them on different days).
- Registration for Math Contests due by Thursday, November 2
Fibonacci day on November 23 – you may have noticed that our community art from last year’s π-day has been taken down from the commons to give space to the Paper-doll project from Mss. Jen’s and Lisa’s class. Some of the students were sad with the “change of seasons”, and have asked for a project tied to the Fibonacci day (1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 …). The day itself, 11/23, is during the Thanksgiving break, but we are considering something that we can hopefully do with the entire school before the holidays, and have it presented at the start of T2 after the break. Last Spring we had a great time exploring the many uses and applications of π in our K-1 math class and up, and are looking forward to exploring as an entire school the Fibonacci sequence and its fascinating properties and applications in the second half of November. Stay tuned for more info on this as it develops further.
Viktor Grigoryan, Ph.D, is Acera’s Math Curriculum Coordinator
Email Viktor@aceraschool.org
