Fraction Bars to Understand Rational Exponents
September 27, 2016 I have been using number lines to teach negative exponents (I will write another post about this soon!) and the built in conceptual understanding explains to my students WHY a zero exponent yields 1 and WHY negative exponents are not necessarily negative numbers and they never reach zero. So WHAT could I do to teach rational exponents? I have used this activity before with my Integrated Math 2 students and it yielded a deep understanding of rational exponents. They understood what the fraction MEANT and we were able to step off from there to the more symbolic representations and procedures. **I've always taught these with blank diagrams because I didn't have fraction bars. Future me will have them draw the diagrams or buy fraction bars.** Here's how I bait the hook... "Start with 64. What two numbers multiply to 64? 8*8. Okay, so HALF the perfect square factors of 64 is 8 and two 8's multiplied make 64? Int...