Proving the Pythagorean Theorem for KIDS

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Math Nerds and People who think they hate math unite!  

This is really cool and helps me to understand something so abstract as A²+B²=C^2. An it is also something that is simple enough for young children to understand and do by solving puzzles.  Plus by teaching you, I am helping to learn it better myself!

Pythagorean Theorem is named for a man named Pythagoras.  He lived between 569-500 B.C.E in Greece.  He created a secret math club that he called the Brotherhood of Pythagoreans, which was devoted to the study of mathematics.  It is not clear if he was the author or if someone else in he group was the author because of the secrecy of the group.  He was not the first person to discover the correspondence between side of the right triangle.

Here is a right triangle.  The sides are A, B, and C.  We can also call C the hypotenuse.

what the pythagorean theorem says is: if you make the side of a right triangle into squares, the area of sides & B will equal the area of 

the square side now we are going to make a triangle with squares

c. what is a square of anumber really mean?

for the length of one side multiplied by the length of the other side equals the amount of area inside the square

here is the equation broken down visually
I have some more puzzles for you to try.  This is the part that younger children will like and be able to understand. 

{Click here to download the free printable}