This past week was very hectic! We learned many things about exponents, but a lot of other stuff was going on as well. Nonetheless, I'm just going to review what we taught in my classroom. Exponents are a shorter way of showing repeated multiplication. When an expression is written in exponential form, it is shown with a base and an exponent. The exponent tells you how many times to multiply the base by itself. So, if you saw "four to the third power", the base would be four (that's the big number) and the exponent would be three (that's the small number above the base and to the right). That would tell you to multiply four by itself three times, as in 4 x 4 x 4, which would be 64. Get it?
After we got a good understanding of how exponents work, we taught on the properties of exponents. There are several that we covered. Whenever the exponent is 0, the answer is always 1, regardless of what the base is. If the exponent is negative, you have to take the reciprocal of the base before you evaluate it. When you are multiplying expressions that have exponents, if the bases are the same, you keep the base and add the exponents. Conversely, if you are dividing expressions which have exponents and the bases are the same, you keep the base and subtract the exponents. When you are raising a power to a power (we call that "power power"), you will see one base with two exponents, one exponent will be in the parentheses with the base and the other will be outside the parentheses. In this case, you keep the base and multiply the exponents. And if you see a product (or more than one thing) in the parentheses and an exponent outside the parentheses, you distribute the exponent among everything inside the parentheses. Whew! That's a lot of stuff we covered last week, isn't it? At any rate, all that stuff we covered is setting us up for what we will do next week, which will be....
... covered when I do my next post tomorrow! See you then!
No comments:
Post a Comment