Today Ben and I focused on negative exponents, their meaning, and how to simplify them. We worked on the white board. I wrote the reminders of how to work with negative exponents. I showed Ben a basic example of 3^-2. We recalled that negative powers do not mean the value is negative, it means 1) move the power and 2) make it positive. So 3^-2 is 1/3^2 which is 1/9. I wrote out similar problems, prompting Ben to respond to questions like "Should we add the powers here or subtract?" Ben was a bit distracted, but eventually responded. Eventually Ben said he sees what I'm doing but he doesn't understand why and it's making him confused. He wanted to know WHY we make the powers positive and move them. I didn't know exactly how to answer him either, so we looked up a video online. While we were watching it, it brought up another concern as why anything to the zero power equals 1. Recess started as we were exploring these ideas. Tomorrow we will resume trying to understand this process and hopefully it will help Ben understand the Why's behind our methods.