In Ignite Christian Academy’s math courses, students strengthen critical thinking skills and learn
to apply mathematical concepts to real-life situations to come up with practical solutions. Math
allows students to see and discover the order of the natural world, through logic, patterns, and
processes. Math gives students insight into the rational, consistent nature of God. Examination
of various mathematical concepts contributes to a deeper understanding of God’s creative and
ordered design and the responsibility to use the ability to reason, problem solve and make
choices based on our understanding of content to serve and glorify God.
The course begins with a unit on input-output relationships that builds a foundation for learning
about functions. Students make connections between verbal, numeric, algebraic, and graphical
representations of relations, and apply this knowledge to create linear functions that can be
used to model and solve mathematical and real-world problems. Technology is used to build
deeper connections among representations. Students focus on formulating expressions and
equations, including modeling an association in bivariate data with a linear equation, and writing
and solving linear equations and systems of linear equations. Students develop a deeper
understanding of how translations, rotations, reflections, and dilations of distances and angles
affect congruency and similarity. Students develop rules of exponents and use them to simplify
exponential expressions. Students extend rules of exponents as they perform operations with
numbers in scientific notation. Estimating and comparing square roots of non-perfect squares to
perfect squares exposes students to irrational numbers and lays the foundation for applications
such as the Pythagorean Theorem, distance, and volume.