At the heart of this meeting was the following table, shared by math educator Howie Hua:
What do you notice? What patterns do you observe?
Setting the Table
Tag: prime factorization
Prime Factorization Graphs
To launch our explorations, we looked at these two graphs:
Prime Factor Stacks
Carol Cashion, teacher of math and other high school equivalency subjects at the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and I co-led this meeting. In October, I observed Carol’s class when she introduced factors using blocks. I was interested to see how the approach opened up a tangible way of playing with factors and concepts such as greatest common factor. In our teachers’ circle, Carol explained her lesson plan and then we explored “prime factor stacks” as a problem-posing and problem-solving method. -Eric
Continue reading “Prime Factor Stacks”Factor Towers
Eric shared activities from a draft lesson on factors, multiples, primes and composites. The lesson is linked in the post if you are interested in using the materials from the meeting. He would love feedback if you use it with a class.
Launch
To start off the meeting, Eric put us into groups and gave each group a bag of paper tiles. He asked us to spend a few minutes looking at them and discussing anything we noticed.
