The plan for today was to get through exponent laws. Tomorrow will likely be a snow day so I wanted them to have the tools to be able to practice working with exponents and order of operations. We had not worked through the examples planned for yesterday so I photocopied the questions and let them work through them in their table groups instead of a warm up.
Lots of misconceptions arose and their understanding of both exponents and the order of operations seems to be improving. I decided on the weekend that order of operations is really the crucial foundation they need to build on. If that is not solid, the rest will fall apart.
Next, they worked on this question in groups:
The conversations were really interesting to listen to. Many groups took our calculators only to find that they weren't helpful as the question asked the expression to be simplified, not evaluated. I'm not sure how much this shows, but this is our consolidation.
I am being very intentional about saying "simplifies to 1" and not "cancels".
We broke things up a little to state each exponent law individually.
We had a little time left to try putting it all together before summarizing.
Though it seemed a bit rushed to me, we focused on understanding, not memorizing rules. Hopefully the practice they will get over the next couple of snowy days will serve them well.
We started today's class by finishing the examples from Friday.
Then I had them do today's warm up in random groups on the white boards.
I asked them to sit down when they finished, but they wouldn't! They were busy comparing answers and trying to figure out who was right and fixing mistakes and it was fantastic! They did eventually all sit down and we talked about the order of operations.
Then we returned to the warm up which they each completed individually before we took it up together. Some were feeling much more confident this time around.
In light of the 40 cm of snow heading our way Tuesday night into Wednesday, I skipped today's visual pattern :(
Instead, we launched into exponents. I try to emphasize that an exponent affects only what is immediately in front of it and try to help them make sense of negative numbers raised to an exponent.
Somewhere along the way I returned their quizzed to be corrected tonight. Their quizzes were actually quite encouraging.
