written by Adara Coates and Stella Hudson of Otter Tail River
Greetings from Otter Tail! We would like to share some math we have been doing this winter!
This is called Algebraic Squaring of a Trinomial. Algebraic notation is when we use a letter to take the place of a number, squaring is when we multiply something by itself. In this case we picked a word to square, we chose GRS, and assigned a value to each of the letters. Then we connected lines to construct a square that represents the values in the equation. We color-coded the squares and rectangles with like values. Using the square as a guide we wrote the equation for an algebraic trinomial. If you would like, you might choose to calculate the total value of the square.
In the future we would like to square the word ‘Montessori’ which would be an algebraic decanomial! It is fun to do this work because we can square any word we would like!
