Today we continued with the concept of factoring expressions. This notion is something Aiden will continue to see throughout his future math courses and he is doing an excellent job of learning this concept. Today we started with the expression 6x-12y-18. Aiden does a great job of finding the GCF between several terms. He factored out 6 to get 6(x-2y-3). We discussed how we an always check our answers when we factor, by using the distributive property to see if we get the original expression. As a challenge problem, I decided to give Aiden a similar expression with more variables (this is an Algebra 1 level problem, not 7th grade math). I presented 6x^2-12xy-18xz. I reminded Aiden the GCF includes constants and variables. We determined the GCF in this case is 6x. Aiden realized that when you factor out the 6x, what is left inside the parenthesis is the result of division. He divided each term by 6x and wrote 6x(x-2y-3z). Aiden likes to input values for the variables to check that both expressions are equivalent when the variables have value. Our conversations led us to discuss the difference between 6x^2 and (6x)^2. We also saw another expression with a negative leading coeefficient. Aiden recalled two approaches to factoring it.