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Friday, July 19, 2013

Geometry: Preparing for Right Triangles by Reviewing Squares, Square Roots, and Rules of Divisibility

Pg 1. Unit 5 Right Triangles

This has been a difficult unit for me to teach my first two year. My area of sttruggle has mainly been simplifying and rationalizing square roots and approaching methods used to solve right triangles.

Pg 2. Perfect Squares & Square Roots

After two years of struggling through teaching Pythagorean theorem, Special Right Triangles and square roots, I decided to start with the basics at the beginning. Squares and square roots.

After finding the squares by hand, I gave the students the square roots. I require squares through 25 to be memorized. I give several quizzes.

 

Pg 3. Rules of Divisibility

This page was just my go to half page fold for notes.

 
I printed out a list of primes from 1 to 1000 for students to use as a quick reference when simplifying radicals.
However, I ran across a layered flip book through pinterest for the rules of divisibility. The idea is from a blog called Growing in Fifth Grade.
Students discover the rules of Divisibility instead of being told and memorizing.

Pg 4. Simplifying Square Roots/Radicals

 

 

I wanted my students to be fluent in simplifying and using square roots. We ended up with an off day and decided to simplify all square roots from 1 to 200. My students loved this. We listed the square roots from 1 to 200 on my white boards around my room. I past out post-its and we set to work simplifying. Students had to show the steps and I modeled what I expected to see. They quickly learned that they could answer the perfect squares and prime number square roots using their journal as a reference. Then I watched as some students struggled and other students taught them how to simplify. We discovered patterns and they began to name these patterns and develop a number sense for simplifying square roots. I guess square roots were no longer scary, because after this, only one or two students struggled with them.

Pg 5. Patterns of Square Roots