This isn’t fair!” To this, I told them to try their best. “But, you’ve never showed us how to work out a problem that looks like this. Slowly, we worked through almost all of the types of exponent problems. On the Smart Board, I demonstrated how to write out the powers in the problems as multiplication to derive the answer. The students who got it right got to go and erase an x from under someone’s name. They held up their individual dry erase boards with their answers. I gave students 30 seconds or so to solve it. I guess my continual emphasis that x squared means x times x and x cubed means x times x times x has paid off! First hour, one of my students raises their hand and asks, “Couldn’t we have just written x to the fourth power below our names?” I almost died of happiness in that moment. Without telling the students what we were doing, I told them all to go write their name on the dry erase board and draw four x’s below. To kick off our review of exponent rules, we played an exponent rules review game that I found on Nathan Kraft’s blog. Want to check out my favorite Amazon items for the classroom? Check out my Amazon favorites page! As an Amazon Associate, I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. This blog post contains Amazon affiliate links.
