Week 1 term 3

Term three. Speeches. Cross country. Another term full of hard work.

We've just started on Algebra, and we've been doing things on rules and graphs.
Say the rule for the cost to hire a hall is C=7h+5. This means it's five dollars to actually hire it and seven for each hour. So to get rid of h, you would substitute it for the number of hours you were staying there. If you were staying for, say, four hours, the cost would be 7x4=28+5=33. So for four hours, C=$33.
If somebody makes little triangles out of matchsticks and adds them on in a line, so one triangle is three matchsticks, two is five, three is seven and so on, to find the number of matchsticks on the nth triangle, you would either find a rule or graph it. The rule for this particular pattern is M=2n+1, so if n was 13 you could go 13x2=26+1=27, so on the thirteenth triangle there would be twenty-seven matchsticks. If it was a graph, you would have n, 1, 2, 3 and so on, and going up would be M, the number of matchsticks, 5, 10, 15, 20, and so on. You would plot the first few points, one =three, two=five, and so on. You draw a line connecting all of them, and then you keep drawing a strait line, going through all the points, until you are equal with the nth  line along the bottom, so if it was 27, you'd cross 27 lines and whatever that point was equal to on the other line was the number of matchsticks needed for 27 triangles. I've personally found rules to be much more accurate, and also they take up about three squares in a maths book where a graph takes up about a hundred at least. I prefer rules.

For reading we've been doing Reader's Theater; like a play but most of the acting is with your voice. It's pretty fun. My group has a script on William Tell, a person who lives in Switzerland who can shoot really straight with a bow and arrow and can sail a boat in a storm and keep it afloat. They're being taken over by Austria and he won't bow to the general's hat. I'm the narrator.
We also are doing some things on ballads; we have to find one that we like and write the meaning or something and then we have to write our own. I love writing rhyming poetry. It comes pretty easily. For example,
I'll tell you the tale of the magic book
The one that blinded you at one look
It was stolen by a sneaky crook
Blindfolded so he couldn't look
But he had been shot in the foot
So he fell and lost the magic book
Which was found by a famous cook
Who fell to his knees and shook
But the crook recovered and he took
The magical blinding book.
All made up, just on the spot. It's random and it's not very good but the point is, rhyming isn't always that hard.