Guilford Free Library Weekly Review (8/20/26)

Hey everyone! This week we started our Pre-Algebra class with two meetings, one on Monday and another on Wednesday. We opened our first class with an introduction on what exactly falls under the category of Pre-Algebra and its importance. Then we went around the group and did a short ice breaker to help get to know each other. Right after, we got straight into reviewing arithmetic. This contained mostly topics that they might have already learned in school such as the number line, and the rules and properties of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, and Division. Here, we learned about patterns in addition and multiplication and some interesting ways that you can use mental math to solve them quickly and Commutative, Associative and Distributive properties as well. After that refresh, we moved into number categories and Order of operations/ PEMDAS. We made sure to do plenty of practice problems here to make sure that this foundational rule was cemented. To conclude this review class, we answered some questions that the students had and showed more example problems to help clarify misunderstandings.
In our second class on Wednesday, we began with a very easy recap trivia about what they learned on Monday with a No Homework Pass on the line. Everyone participated and was able to recall most of the topics we covered so there we decided to give no homework for the whole class. Now that everyone was warmed up, we got straight into the main topic for the day which was exponents. The first thing we taught was “what was an exponent?” and the relevant terms, for example, “to the power of”, “squared”, and “cubed”. We made sure to mention that any number to the power of 0 is 1, except 0, as well. Then we taught about perfect squares and challenged them to recite all the perfect squares up to 20x20. Afterwards, we taught the bulk of our lesson on exponent rules, including Product of Powers and Quotient of Powers with the same base and different exponent and same exponent and different base and the Power of Power rule. We spent around 15 minutes practicing here until we moved on to exponents with negative bases vs. exponents with negative powers. There was some initial confusion here so we spent some extra time doing problems and explaining the details. Finally, before the end of class, we talked about square roots before getting a glimpse into number theory, our next big topic, with conversation about Factors and Multiples.

Overall our classes this week were fairly engaged and we were able to move quickly through the material, especially on Wednesday. The students also demonstrated strong problem-solving skills, so we might include more challenging and multistep problems in our next class. See you next week!