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"What does it take to learn the Index Laws? Surprisingly little if you (i) can fold a piece of paper (ii) can multiply by two. I first observed my head teacher do a version of this lesson last year with his Year 7 class, and had the joy of doing a more advanced version with my Year 9 this year. I have a feeling the idea goes back to the dawn of maths teaching, but I haven't seen a resource explaining it, so thought it would be fun to share my take on it."

"We are in the middle of our polynomial unit and I decided now would be an appropriate time to teach exponent rules. I had prepared a concept attainment for the exponent rules before I talked to my coach. She suggested that we stray away from teaching 'rules' and rather teach the concept behind it. So basically, I only taught the concept of multiplying the coefficients and adding the exponents. When it came to the power to a power rule, we literally expanded it out and then multiplied coefficients and added the exponent. The more that we practiced the concept and writing them out, the more students figured out the shortcut of taking the coefficient to the power and then just multiplying the exponents. "