Prealgebra (G5-7)

Description

PreAlgebra is an Elementary/Middle school course that will prepare students for the next level study of Mathematics in Middle/High school. Usually, students in 5th~7th grades are the best fit for this course. This is a “gateway” or “bridging” course designed to help American students lay down a broad foundation in Algebra, Geometry, Number Theory, Counting, Probability, and Statistics.

Our Prealgebra course prepares students for advanced mathematical study using the Art of Problem Solving Curriculum, which includes a thorough exploration of the fundamentals of arithmetic, including fractions, exponents, and decimals. We also introduce beginning topics in number theory and algebra, including common divisors and multiples, primes and prime factorizations, basic equations and inequalities, and ratios. Our curriculum is based on the series of books from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) with certain enrichment, emphasis on problem-solving and critical thinking skills, and develop a robust and flexible teaching program for middle-school and high-school students.

Here our course is designed to help students smoothly and successfully begin this great journey with two groups of major goals:

• Help students to develop broad interests in Math, right attitudes toward Math, and good working habits in Math. The study of PreAlgebra is a perfect opportunity to achieve these goals since students will have a very rich exposure to all interesting topics in Math in this course. Also, most problems, tasks, and challenges are still at introductory levels, and most students are still in very young ages, they will have enough free space and time to do their own explorations and develop broad interest, right attitudes and good habit in Math. Of course, to achieve these goals, it is ultimately up to the students’ own commitment and efforts. Educators and course themselves can only work as facilities.
• Help students to start early, easily, and joyfully in their long, fun, but also a tough journey of learning Math. It is a common experience that successes are one of the best boosters for further successes. Once students found the joy of being challenged and then succeeding in this early course, they will have stronger interest and motivation to move even fast and work harder to enjoy more challenges and successes. So if the start of this journey is a great success, their development in Math in the future will become even easier.

About the Teacher:

Penglin Huang graduated from Peking University in 1994 with a bachelor degree, and graduated from Texas A&M University

in 2002 with a PhD degree. In the past 14 years he has been working as an actuary in the insurance industry, mainly

focusing on predictive modeling.

Since 2010 he has been coaching math for middle school and high school students in his spare time. In his teaching,

promoting genuine interest in math is the top priority. He tries to motivate student to build a good habit and study a little

math every day, so that upon their graduation in high school, their future career choices are not limited.

He uses the Art of Problem Solving series of books as the basic teaching material, and further enriches them with mental

math, math games and math history.

黄老师，毕业于北京大学，并于2002年毕业于德克萨斯农工大学，获得博士学位。自2010年以来，他一直在业余时间提供数学教练。在他的教学中，提高对数学的真正兴趣是重中之重。除新加坡数学的内容，黄老师还会增加一些趣味数学题，培养学生逻辑思维能力和空间想象能力，让孩子爱上数学!