Pythagorean Theorem Notes

These are the pythagorean theorem notes I used with my trigonometry students in our beginning of year geometry review. We glued these notes in our trigonometry interactive notebooks.

The Pythagorean Theorem booklet was stole from the blog of Jessie Hester.  She has a ton of resources for teaching the Pythagorean Theorem!  If I was teaching geometry, I would have gone way more in depth and used a lot more of her amazing activities!

As soon as I passed out the booklets, my trig students wanted to know if I would give them time to color the covers.  Yes, we did take some time to just sit and color.  It’s fun to watch my trig students get so invested in creating their notebooks!  I’m actually kinda glad that my school does not own any trig or pre-calculus books because I probably wouldn’t be doing notebooks with this specific class if they did.

Inside the Pythagorean Theorem Booklet:

I liked the table set-up for these pythagorean theorem problems a lot!  I would have never thought of setting them up this way.

This next page was also stolen from Jessie Hester.

This was a new foldable type for me.  I love trying out new foldable designs!  The flap folds down to reveal two more flaps underneath.  🙂

I’m going to be honest.  I’m a math teacher, and I have to really, really, really think about the distance formula.  It’s just not something I have memorized off the top of my head.  I know how to derive it, and I can come up with it if you give me a minute.  But, it’s not my weapon of choice for calculating the distance between two points.  I prefer to use the Pythagorean Theorem for finding the distance between two points, but I wanted to show my students both options and let them choose for themselves.

They agreed with me that the pythagorean theorem made the work of the problem seem a lot more efficient.  And, since I have students who really struggle with integers, they liked the fact that there were a lot less positives and negatives to watch out for.

I printed off this practice sheet from Jessie’s blog for students to glue in their notebooks.

Here’s our notes for finding distance between two points together.