 Hi and welcome to my webinar on Square Root Day. My name is Heidi Rethmeyer. I am a staff developer at ESU 8 and for many of you math-minded people like me you are probably familiar with Pi Day, which is coming up here in about a week on March 14th. But also this year we have a special day on our calendar and that occurs April 4th 2016 also called Square Root Day. So I thought this would be a great opportunity for you to either introduce or review Roots and perfect squares with your students. So I took the time to find some resources and activities that perhaps you could do with your students. I found around 15 and tried to narrow them down to 10-ish. I think I combined several of them but a lot of these activities don't necessarily have to take a whole class period. They could be something you just do at the beginning of your lesson or something like a bell ringer. So let's get started. So the first one. I always think this is a very important topic to cover with your student and that's just taking some time to look at the numbers and look for patterns. So one thing you could do is just start listing perhaps all the square root days that would happen in a century. So the first one actually was January 1st 2001 and this one is also kind of special. It's the 4th 1 4 4 16 and I like to think of some of these activities as a math talk. So if you happen to do math talks with your students this would be a great activity they could do. They could just find the perfect squares. They could look at the pattern within the perfect squares. They can see the difference between the numbers go from 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc., odd numbers. Maybe you could do a math talk on how old will you be in a certain year when another square root day happens. Find how many square root days are going to occur in a century and then another pattern which I think is kind of neat is these squares that you can reverse the numbers. 13 squared is 169 and 31 squared is 961. You could do the same thing with 12 and 21. So maybe you can have your students look for others and just have some discussions about the process and the thought process that your students go through in determining their answers because I think it's important to see how different students may approach a problem in a different way. Also when you're doing discussions like these with your students I think sometimes in saying what do you know when you look at a problem or a set of numbers maybe you can ask instead what do you notice. So just looking for patterns and not necessarily what you know because some students might struggle with that so but everyone could notice something about a certain group of numbers. Also and I'm just throwing this one in there too this could be a real simple one you could do this to your clock. I did this to my clock in my office and you could have your students try to figure out why perhaps on this particular day April 4th that you did this to your clock and see if they could come up with the idea that April 4th 2016 happens to be a square root day. Okay idea number two pictogram puzzles. I just found some cute puzzles again this might be a fun bell ringer you could put up at the beginning of your class period. You could find a picture of a root of a tree in the shape of a square a little puzzle of the square around the three so three squared is nine but three cubed is 27. I grew up in the 80s so vans were very popular and I see they've had a comeback now and I don't my daughter looked at that she wasn't even sure what it was but I said it looks like the square root of the answer but it's actually the vans logo and then of course I had to throw in some big bang theory with Howard Wallowitz and his you must be the square root of negative one because you can't be real that's something you could do with your upper level classes if maybe they're starting to talk about imaginary numbers and you may find some other good ones out there those are just a few that I found. Topic number three you could play bingo with your students with both squares and roots this is one I just made using a word document I just made a table and wrote in some numbers and you could laminate this and just have your students maybe use a dry erase marker and then you could read off either perfect squares you could say you know the square of two or two squared or you could say the square root of 121 and maybe you can even have your students make their own bingo template with numbers with either perfect squares or roots and then obviously you would just play a bingo game and you could either go with a bingo or a blackout but I think it would also be fun for the students to make their own bingo board. A scavenger hunt I always like an activity where you can get up the students up and moving around this is one where perhaps I would make a list of activities that the students have to do maybe even just around the school building or around the school grounds maybe they have to go out and find a picture of a a the shape of a square or even a number somewhere or classroom number that is a perfect square they have to maybe go find the square of a classroom number I just use Mrs. Walsh as an example or maybe you have some classrooms that are a root of a perfect square you could have them find whose classroom that is have them dive into their math textbook by finding the square of a particular lesson number or you could even do something where they find the square root of your age you don't have to do that and they better get that right and never not have it too big for me but you could do a fun little scavenger hunt where you get the students out and moving around and collecting information so I think that would be a real fun one for the day you can also do something called find someone who that would be similar to a scavenger hunt but it would just be maybe your students in the classroom where you say find someone who has the square root of four siblings you know that way the students would get a chance to you know talk about themselves which is also a fun activity and helps to keep them engaged topic number five using cheezots to illustrate and for the younger kids you could just use them to make perfect squares to show what five by five looks like okay but I think for your older kids and especially your middle school kids where you're introducing the Pythagorean theorem this is a great way to illustrate the Pythagorean theorem and how it works so you could have three I do it just use a three four five triangle and show them that the areas of the legs is going to be equal to the area of the hypotenuse so I think that's a great way to illustrate Pythagorean theorem and you know kids always love it when they can eat something in the process idea number six using dominoes I found a template of dominoes online and just cut them out use different color paper and wrote some squares and I even added some other exponents you don't have to just use squares and you know in a lot of these activities you don't have to use just for roots and squares you could use them for lots of other things you know you could just use them for multiplication division addition subtraction algebraic equations or inequalities for the older kids so there's a lot of things that you could do with these I'm just happened to show you how you could use these for the square root day so I just wrote down all sorts of combinations of squares and roots and also making sure that I write it out not just two squared but two times two so that they can see the different representations that you can have so that's just a quick activity that you can do with the students to and again I just found a template online cut them out and drew them on there so you don't really have to take a lot of time for some of these activities hey topic number seven making a puzzle this is something I actually used with inequalities in my eighth grade math class and I just again modified it to use with roots and square roots so I I made a table on a word document and printed it out and then just wrote on the edges and to make the puzzle work they have to put it together so that any two edges that meet have to have an equivalent form so in other words 10 times 10 has to equal a hundred so they have to be equivalent so I just cut them up give them a baggie full of them and then they have to try to put them together and that's always a fun activity and that would be fun for them to work with a partner to so that is another very quick one that you can do doesn't take a whole lot of time and again maybe you could just do it at the beginning of class to think about how roots and perfect squares are written Estimania this is a another quick one that you could do or just more like a game you could have your students break up into partners or teams whatever would work best and then this case you would use your smart board or your Promethean if you don't know you have the ability to roll a multiple dice in this case I chose to and then you can just draw a square root symbol on your smart board and whether you use smart board or Promethean I know they both have this capability so in this case it rolled a 22 so for the game you might have them write what two whole numbers is that between or you could say what whole number is it closest to and then maybe you could have them do something special when a perfect square comes up so that's just a fun game to help them think through the process I know for a lot of my students finding what two whole numbers the square root of a number is between was always a bit of a challenge so I thought this would have been a really fun game to do with them to help them work through that process and also I think it's important you know to have the opportunity for students to work in partners and and to talk to each other and think through the process about how each student might solve that problem so that's Estimonia and that one you can use some technology with pyramid math I like this one again for the younger kids maybe if you're just introducing some multiplication or they're learning their multiplication facts I like this to help visualize what a perfect square looks like it also would help to introduce the concept of area so you would have to find some blocks maybe go talk to your elementary or some of your primary teachers to find some of these blocks I know I had a whole tub of them in my middle school classroom but they could make a nine by nine square eight by eight and build it up and make a pyramid and help to visualize each of these squares and that each one makes a perfect square nine by nine eight by seven by seven etc so I just think it's a great way for to introduce the concept and even just the term square to the younger kids because eventually they'll get to that that idea and hopefully they can fall back on this visualization of yeah if I make a seven by seven it makes a square okay topic number ten speed dating you could certainly call this something else for the younger kids but I really like this it kind of uses the idea of speed dating where each student is going to have a flash card and on one side is a problem and on the other side is the answer so if I have my card I have the answer pointing to me in the problem pointing to my partner so you line up in two lines and then you have a partner and you might have to do some coaching at first with your students about being a good partner so you want your partner to try to figure out the answer and you might have to coach them a little bit and you want to explain to the students you don't want to just give them the answer you might have to give them some clues to determine the answer and again this is one that you could use not just with roots and squares you could do this with anything with equations and such so so what you would do is with your partner you would hold up your cards and try to figure out the answers once everyone got the answers you would switch the card with the partner and then you would slide down one person and do it again so each time you should get a new partner and a new problem for each of you and then you just keep doing that all the way down so you've had a chance to meet with everyone on the opposite side so that's the whole concept of the speed dating thing so I think that's just a fun one again to get the kids up and moving have an opportunity to discuss with one another about how to solve problems and obviously just a great way to cover the content whether it's roots and squares or something else entirely right so those are just my top 10 ideas that was really quick on some activities again it does not have to take the whole class period just want you to have some fun and introduce the kids to or review just square roots and perfect squares and get them thinking about how math can be something that you know ties to everyday life and notice some things and patterns especially the 4 4 16 if you want to go all out there are t-shirts out there so you could do that too so if you have any questions or thoughts about square root day or you have some other ideas please send them my way or if you have questions about how I did some of these please send me an email or give me a call I would love to talk to you about it have a great day and thanks for listening