Mauricio and Emily make sense of a new situation in which both the length and width of a given garden are increased by 2 meters.
Episode Supports
Students’ Conceptual Challenges
Mauricio makes a prediction for the area of the new garden that is missing a piece of the new garden [4:28]. This is a common error that students make, even when they are explicitly using the distributive property for binomials. You can help by asking students to link their predictions and calculations to pictures that represent the context, as Mauricio and Emily do in the next episode.
Focus Questions
For use in a classroom, pause the video and ask this question:
[Pause the video at 2:09] Make a prediction for the area of the new garden which has a length and width each 2 m longer than a garden with a length of 7 m and a width of 3 m.
Supporting Dialogue
[Pause the video at 4:27] Did either of the predictions made by Emily and Mauricio match yours? Talk with a partner about which prediction you think is better.
MathTalk