Day 14: Snowflakes

Paper snowflakes. A Mathsmas essential. My snowflake-making craft has improved significantly since the advent of Mathsmas. Largely through lessons learnt from "Make your own paper snowflakes", which I bought as a gift for a colleague then shamelessly borrowed and used extensively. Did you know they are supposed to be hexagon-based? You probably did. I didn't.

So I did a worksheet all those years ago with a cloze passage, some facts, symmetry, and folding based on working out the angle to fold it on. Here it is.

Of course there are other cool snowflakes to make, like these twisty paper ones. For me, the little snips and cuts and experimentation of the traditional ones has a certain feel to it.

Making Shapes Puppets

Earlier I mentioned the start of the Shapes Puppet Show idea. We are making good progress. Song lyrics are written (courtesy of their music teacher) and we have focused our making on the shapes needed for the songs, and a few extra cool ones to be judges on "Which Shape's Got Talent?".

I beleive this character is performing "I'm Hexy and I know it".

Sadly there is no song for the dodecahedron. But he is very good at eating other puppets. Perhaps he'll be a judge.

Starting with cardboard bodies, we have been adding coloured paper and fabric to give them a stylish look. It's amazing what some cute eyes will suddenly do for a puppet.

 Aren't they just adorable?

A lot of songs feature cubes.

We've had lots of discussions about different ways to make the puppet best represent the shape, especially for 2D shapes. The two paths seem to be to either keep it in 2D or make it into a prism, where the front face is the 2D shape of the character.

This circle is really a cylinder, but with the outer sides covered in black the focus is kept on the circle of the face.

This square, on the other hand, is kept as 2D as possible and controlled using sticks from below.

This fellow was originally Sherlock Cones. Can't remember his name now. Coney McSomething I think.

 

Today they were mostly finished so we paraded around a small section of the school showing them off to some teachers and senior maths classes we found. I think they are something to be proud of.