Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Perfect Squares & Square Roots
I love to use color tiles to teach perfect squares and square roots! I pass out baggies of color tiles and then ask the students to work with a partner to create as many different squares as possible. The students are allowed to create the squares showing the area or the perimeter. I then have each team share one of the squares they created and I put it on the overhead for the class to see. (I always put up the area model so the perfect square is easy to see.) We discuss what makes each of the shapes a square before we discuss the perfect square. We then work backwards to see the square roots. Once the children have seen perfect squares and square roots like this, they usually remember it!
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Good idea. Visualization for me is the key to getting through to most of my students.
ReplyDeleteI used this lesson as well and students were able to make some great conjectures for the rectangles they were making. They love drawing them into their notebooks as well. It was a great way to "refer" back later during the unit.
ReplyDeleteI have used this method and it really does work. I started the lesson with a little prior knowledge. I asked the question. What is a square? Of course I got that all sides are equal. Ok Perfect! Now using your tiles CREATE a (Perfect) Square. This is where the students struggled. They knew all sides had to be equal but kept forming rectangles. Oops. But by them making a mistake like that they corrected it quickly and were able to move on to them creating as many DIFFERENT ones they could (of course you need a lot if you want them to get to 100). Also having them count the number of tiles matching the number of tiles on 1 side to how many they have total.
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