The eighth grade worked on unit that was introduced to them at the end of November. This unit entitled Growing, Growing, Growing focused on exponential relationships, in which a quantity grew larger or smaller at an increasing rate rather than at a constant rate. Exponential relationships are often encountered in such fields as business and biology. We are dealing with exponential growth when we invest money in an account that earns compound interest or when we study population growth. We can see exponential decay in the way the body metabolizes medicine.
Exponential growth involves patterns that are based on multiplication rather than addition.
Students learned how to recognize exponential patterns in tables and graphs and to write equations to represent those patterns. Students in grades 7 and 8 worked on a Millennium unit for December. The unit began with an intro to what the new Millennium was and what words were closely associated with the Millennium. Each student created a time line from the past 1000 years and discussed past predictions about the year 2000. We then made our own predictions for what we think life will be like in the future.