IN the past few days, we started a new Math unit on square roots and surface area. We are almost halfway into the unit, but we are mainly learning about Square roots for now. What is a square root? A square root is a number that produces a specified quantity when multiplied by itself. When you want to find a square root, you put the sign of the square root on top of that number for example: √(49)= 7. Easy right? But there are also different ways to find the square roots of decimals and fractions.
DECIMALS
But first decimals, to find the square root of a decimal there are different ways. One way we learned to find out was counting all of the square roots up to 20. So then when we get a square root like : √(0.25) we know that 5×5=25, so when you put a decimal in front of the number 5, making it 0.25 and squaring it, we know then that it will be 0.5 because 0.5 x 0.5= 0.25
FRACTIONS:
When we want to find the square root of a decimal, we first must use benchmarks for both the numerator and denominator. For example: if you had 6/12 you find the closest square number to 6 and 12. so it would become
7/12–>8/14 then divide it by 2, —>4/7. Then square it.
Hopefully that was very helpful for you and that you now know how square roots work.
Monty Atim-Blog 