Kids love geometry. It’s so hands-on. At least, it should be. I can’t imagine trying to teach kids geometry without letting them draw, cut, design, build. 3-D geometry taught on paper? I don’t think so! Unless, of course, you’re designing nets. And that’s exactly what I did with a group of sixth graders. We were working on volume and I thought it would be fun to re-design the soda can. It required a lot of hands-on work that involved graph…
During a unit on 2-dimensional geometry I use art to tie in the polygons we’ve been studying. I share a variety of paintings by the artist Pablo Picasso and we talk about the shapes they see. Then, using the idea of straight lines and hard edges, students create their own work of Cubism out of construction paper.
Tying in pointillism are during a unit on fractions, decimals, and percents is perfect! How? It begins with painter Georges Seurat. Seurat was a post-impressionist painter who painted by placing tiny, preceise brush strokes of different colors close to one another so they blend at a distance. I share with the students his painting The Circus and we discuss the patience it probably took to paint the whole thing using tiny dots! I then pass out loupes and colored comics…
Mathematics and nature often go hand-in-hand. In this lesson, students study the spirals of the nautilus and tie it in to a numerical sequence called the Fibonacci sequence. They use the sequence to re-design the nautilus using home-made compasses. I begin the lesson by showing the first few terms of the Fibonacci sequence and have students work together to see if they can figure out the pattern and the next few numbers in the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,…
Ancient Africans in Egypt enlarged pictures by using nets of squares. In this fun project, students re-construct a smaller picture into a very large picture. In mathematics, we call this dilation which is a type of trasformation studied in geometry. This is an activity I do with fourth graders and above. I first begin with a picture that I know the students will have fun re-constructing. Hence…Sponge Bob. Depending on the number of students who will be working on one…