Prime Number Planning

I’ve been thinking about what a prime-number themed day would look like based on some questions on Facebook. I’ve done prime related topics here and there but never a whole unit in the past. So far I’m still missing some material to bind this all together.

Lecture:

• Starter questions: What is a prime? How to test if a number is prime? Ideas about spacing? Can we find a formula?  Maybe do this as a 5 minute brain storm and report session. This might be a chance to test pair/stand/share.
• Sieve of Eratosthenes. Most kids have seen this so maybe we want to do a large communal one on a giant piece of butcher paper.
• Proof by contradiction that primes are infinite based on factoring. (Do I need to review factoring?)  This stresses again the need to do some simple examples of this technique early on.
• Something with Mersenne Primes?

Activities:

• Ulam’s Spiral. Preprint the graph to move the kids to the core of the activity quicker.

Problems:

I still need to find a few appropriately leveled but interesting prime related problems.