Dear Mom and Dad,

We have learned a lot in math class! From graphs to order of operations, here's what we've learned so far this year.

We have learned about bar and line graphs. We used bar graphs for things such as surveys, data, and frequency charts. We used line graphs for things like data over a period of time. For example, stocks would be on a line graph, but favorite type of dog would be on a bar graph. To learn more about these, we had a assignment to find a graph and tell as much as we could about it. It was really fun!

Another thing we learned about was the order of operations, or PEMDAS. PEMDAS stands for Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction. That's the order we do operations. We even sang a song about it! A sentence in parenthesis would come before a multiplication sentence, but an addition problem would come after division. Brackets ([]) extend parenthesis if there is a problem that goes in parenthesis, but has another parenthesis in them. Here's an example of brackets.

[3+ ( 5+5)] +2

Another subject we learned about was probability. Probability is the chance of something happening. For example, if I said that there were ten candies in a bag and five of them were blue and five of them were red, the probability of picking red would be 5/10, or ½. We also learned about two other types of probability, experimental probability and theoretical probability. Theoretical probability is what should happen. If I asked what the chances were of picking a red candy out of a box that had 3 red, 5 blue, and 2 yellow, the theoretical probability is 3/10. If I asked you to pick a random candy in a bag without looking ten times, you might get a different answer, which is experimental probability. Experimental probability is what actually happens. If you did it ten times, you may have gotten a blue seven times, a red twice and a yellow once.

Math class has been fun! I don't think I've disliked anything. I hope you found this letter useful. I can't wait to see what we do next!

Sincerely,

LSGA