Practice is on us this week! Use these plans to prepare your students to compete or to review math skills.
These plans cover a variety of math topics and skills, and are designed to cover 45-60 minutes of practice time.
A special thank you to Taren Long, our 2020-2021 DoD STEM Ambassador!
Taren created many of the awesome Practice Plans below, based on her experience as longtime MATHCOUNTS coach.
Warm-Up
We start with a short problem set so Mathletes can practice related skills that will be expanded upon throughout the practice plan.
The Problems
Next, a video introduces a common type of competition problem or a helpful problem-solving strategy with 2-3 example problems.
Piece It Together
Next, Mathletes solve a set of related problems to build on the strategies and skills they learned in the Warm-Up and problems video.
Extension
We'll end with a related activity, puzzle or game to give Mathletes a fun opportunity to apply their problem-solving skills creatively!
This plan will introduce students to The Fundamental Counting Principle – a faster method to determining the total number of possible outcomes of an event without listing them all out!
Difficulty: Easy
Calculating the least common multiple is something many students are asked to do, but in this plan they will use their understanding of the least common multiple to stretch themselves to solve more complex problems.
Difficulty: Medium
After refreshing Mathletes on the order of operations, the video will then focus on how to solve problems where an unfamiliar symbol is defined to be a new type of operations that follows given rules.
Difficulty: Easy
This plan builds on what students already know about ratios to introduce the definition of probability as a ratio of desired outcomes to total outcomes. Mathletes will then practice calculating the likelihood of single events.
Difficulty: Easy
In this practice plan, Mathletes will recognize visual patterns and practice defining them numerically in order to find the number of elements in the pattern after a large number of repetitions.
Difficulty: Medium
Mathletes will become familiar with properties of 45-45-90 and 30-60-90 triangles. In this plan, the relationships between the sides of these two special right triangles will be derived. Then, Mathletes will apply these to solve for unknown lengths in geometric figures.
Difficulty: Medium