Building Bridges

In the fall, the fine young gents chose to do a bridge-building study. Third-grade gent has ambitions to be an engineer who builds bridges "and other stuff." Well, sort of. He's either going to be an engineer who cooks and plays music for fun, or a musician who cooks and builds bridges, or a famous chef who designs bridges and kitchens and plays several instruments. And why not? We started our bridge study with this amazing book:

Bridges: Amazing Structures to Design, Build & Test (Kaleidoscope Kids), by Carol A. Johman.

The book is a wonderful blend of information and hands-on practice. We had a grand time making human structures to demonstrate the principles of tension and compression. The fine young gents learned about different occupations involved in bridge building and drew and labeled their favorite of the three basic types of bridges.

And the fine young gents started building:
Third-grade gent started with a single sheet of paper across two books. Will it hold a car? He took notes on his failures and successes. He ended up with an accordion-fold sandwiched between two flat pieces to give his Hot Wheels a sturdy smooth bridge.

We've only gotten halfway through the Bridges! book. We keep getting sidetracked by other fantastic building resources, like Bill Nye the Science Guy's video, Structures. Check out these egg structures!





We also got the idea for this bridge of straws and pins from a Bll Nye video:
The gents wanted to explore and discover construction using household materials, too. They made a maze for the Minotaur, a ziggurat, pyramids, and refrigerator box forts. They built bridges using stacking cups, dominoes, marbles mazes, pick-up sticks and (of course) wooden blocks.
I stepped around and over block bridges, mazes and houses for weeks.

The holidays afforded construction opportunities with a new set of materials. What can you make with graham crackers and leftover icing?
Or gumdrops and toothpicks?
Or gingerbread and candy?
And we've been doing challenges from one of our favorite blogs, Think! No pictures, so no posts, but we've kept ourselves busy. Eventually we'll finish our Bridges! book, but not (I think) our bridges study.

Next up, the book the eldest of the fine young gents spotted the day after Christmas and went, "Oooooooooooooo."
I didn't see him for nearly an hour.

Stardust

We're made of stardust, and stardust is atoms.

Great Pyramids

Our middle gent turned 7 last week.

Sniff. Seven??? Already??? Can't your sweet momma have one more year of delightful six? Excuse me for a moment while I collect myself. Alas, and hooray!, it seems I get a year of delightful seven instead, which is just as marvelous.

He asked for chocolate cupcakes, and we all decorated. The frosting was really that bright blue. Yowza!
For his birthday, he got the new Playmobil Sphinx with a Mummy. And, way cool, some Tomb Raiders with Camels! Let's side track for yet another moment. (Bear with me.) We've been studying Egypt. Our Egypt study has stretched several months past our timeline because the fine young gents have been so fascinated by the ancient Egyptians, middle gent in particular. We've even priced airline tickets to Egypt, mostly to explain why we're not going. He's not even deterred by the fact that it's blazing hot in Egypt. He wants to sail on the Nile River, visit the Sphinx, and go inside a pyramid. "Someday, Mom," he promised earnestly, "I'll go to Egypt with you." I certainly hope so, my darling.

To my point. Playmobil sells a Pyramidtoo. It's pretty awesome. It's also pretty expensive, and they were out of stock at the store for which we had a 50% off certificate. So, no pyramid. A fact my fine young gent noted. "Hmmm. We need a pyramid."

Note the "Teachable Moments" label at the bottom of this post. My poor gents.

"You're right, honey," I said. "Let's build a pyramid!"

We started with paper:
We printed several pyramid templates. The gents and I spent a happy half hour cutting and folding paper pyramids from different kinds of templates. I didn't do a lot of teaching or talking. (I know, right? Me! I didn't talk a lot. Maybe I should go lie down.) I just let the different templates, which ended in the same pyramids, work for themselves.

My fine young gent noted that the little paper pyramids weren't quite big enough. So I pulled moving boxes out of the attic. Then the real work began.

"How am I going to make a template for you?" I asked the gents. They blithely asked me to print one. Then they said, "Oh. Yeah," when I reminded them of the limitation imposed by the size of our paper. They were a little stumped, so I measured the templates with them...each side of the base was the same length because the base is a square. Let's measure the edges of the triangles that make up the sides....OH!

Fortunately, loving math-brain was available to work with our eldest gent:
They did it the math way, with multiplying and such. I helped middle gent. I didn't want to think that hard, so we did it the measuring and observing way, recreating the template by deciding how long our sides should be then copying the model. Fortunately again, loving husband had to go to work, so eldest gent and I created the largest pyramid together the measuring and observing way, which meant that he got to see how both equally valid methods ended with the same results. He cut it and folded it almost all by himself.

Ancient Egypt has taken up most of our living room floor.
Now we just need a white-walled palace from which the Pharoah and his soldier can dangle the captured tomb raiders.
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Pyramid Templates:
The template the boys chose, as our boxes were rectangular. You have to check out this whole site: Paper Models of Polyhedra Could it possibly get any more math-awesome?

Pyramid template at Do To Learn Kids

And from our beloved Enchanted Learning: Make a Pyramid

Nature, Nature, Everywhere

Nature Study: The boys found an ant nest outside the Dolphin Center in Nuevo Vallarta. It's what they do.

They also catch pollywogs.

And throw rocks, and build dams.

Who says we took the week off school? Outdoor studies abounded in Mexico: Ants, pelicans, iguanas, butterflies (mariposa!), water, rocks, sand, trees (Bananas! On a tree!), flowers, birds.

Life is good.

Wordless Wednesday: Paperwhites

Teachable moments: Symmetry

The fine young gents and I just spent twenty minutes dissecting the alphabet. Which letters can be divided symmetrically? We spent almost five minutes on "O" alone. Second-grade gent, all on his own, figured out that "O" can be divided symmetrically in "more than a googol" ways, which started a short discussion of infinity, which the gent in turn related to earlier "half of a half of a half of a half...." math play.

I thought the alphabet would take five minutes. They surprise me this way sometimes. An activity I'm sure will be a hit falls flat. A simple activity I throw in as a filler sparks a lengthy discussion. The point is not that I have math geniuses, by the way. Nor am I a math genius or a teacher extraordinaire. It's a fairly simple activity in which kindergarten gent was able participate easily, and I mostly sat there and asked questions. The point is that by taking extra time to really explore the idea when they were engaged and interested, we had the opportunity to explore new ideas.

Alphabet symmetry: Go low-tech, and print the capital letters on a sheet of paper from the recycle bin. Draw a line through each letter to divide it so that both sides are matching. Look at the halves. Do they have to be facing the same direction to be the same shape? Are they still symmetrical if you have to turn the pieces? What happens if you draw a line here? Or here? I draw my "U" with a tail. Is there a way to change it to make it symmetrical?

Or print out this worksheet: Symmetry in the Alphabet

Or go high-tech. For a more in-depth exploration of symmetry, try this webquest, Symmetry All Around, to learn about point symmetry and rotational symmetry, create a snowflake or a quilt block, or to find more links to activities for teaching symmetry.
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On another math note, Julie K in Taiwan left us a great tessellations link in the comments on the tessellations post. It's too good to miss. Visit Tessellation Town! Don't miss the rest of the site. Visit mathcats.com for lots of math fun. Thanks, Julie!