Lesson Plan: The Greatest Common Factor of Monomials Mathematics • 7th Grade
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to find the greatest common divisor (factor) of two or more monomials.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- find the greatest common factor of a given list of monomials and understand how to find the greatest common factor in general,
- use the greatest common factor of the terms of a polynomial to completely factor the polynomial,
- use a given greatest common factor of a given list of monomials or the terms of a polynomial to find unknown values,
- factor a polynomial completely in a real-world scenario and use the factored form to solve a problem.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- monomials and polynomials,
- laws of exponents,
- the distributive property and multiplying polynomials.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- factoring by grouping,
- factoring terms that are not monomials,
- factoring “special” quadratics (e.g., the perfect square quadratics and the difference of two squares).
