Factoring: Greatest Common Factors

Objectives:

• Students will review factors and prime factorization.

• Students will learn about greatest common factors.

• Students will learn how to find the GCF’s of two and three numbers.

• Students will learn how to find the GCF’s of monomials.

Suggested Grades:

Seventh Grade - Eighth Grade - Ninth Grade - Tenth Grade - including special education students

Lesson Procedure:

Print the classroom lesson plan and worksheet questions (see below).

Lesson Excerpt:

Common Factors

- "Now the next thing that we are going to talk about is common factors. Common factors are found when you are factoring two or more numbers. When you are done factoring, you take a look at the common factors between the two numbers. Those are the common factors. It is just as simple as it sounds. Let's look at an example."

- On Board: 16 and 36

- "Now I am looking for the common factors between 16 and 36. In order to do this, I am going to start by factoring both 16 and 36. I want to factor these two numbers as completely as I can to their prime factors. If I break them down to their prime factors, then I will easily be able to see the common factors between 16 and 36."

Continued...