Merry Mathsmas

That's the end of the Mathsmas Advent Calendar for 2012. Tomorrow is the last day for students to attend for us, then two days of Staff Development then the holidays!!

Merry Mathsmas Everyone!

Day 20: More Nets

On Day 17 I mentioned PaperCritters and the idea of getting students to make Christmas characters. I tried this yesterday and it was lots of fun! Some cute reindeer and elves and the Grinch.

I thought I'd share a few of mine with you so that you can use them if you like. The reindeer don't have antlers, but I marked some slits on the top to insert some.

First, the colourful Rudolph.




Then I did the reindeer and a snowman in black and white, since most teachers are probably like me and don't have easy access to colour printing or photocopying. That way they can be coloured in before assembly instead.

Day 17: Christmas nets

Nets are great fun, and this year I'm starting to discover the abundance that are out there in the papercraft world.

We start with the very simple at Kidzone (which also has a bunch of other Christmas worksheets). They have a cube, rectangular prisms and a triangular pyramid/tetrahedron. You can print them in colour or in black and white and let the students colour them.

Then we can move on in difficulty and prettiness, although these ones are all meant to be printed in colour. There's this adorable December 2012 snowman desk calendar (all of these calendars are incredibly awesome, I'll have to start keeping an eye on this site). I liked it so much I enlarged it (manually, which is why it sits all wonky). I'm crossing off the days until the last one!

I'd love to use some of their ideas to make a big calendar for each term next year. Their Nutcracker from last December is awesome too.

I haven't tried these ones yet but I'm keen to. There are some crazy Japanese monkey things complete with presents, sleigh and tree plus lots of elves plus Santa, reindeer, sleigh and tree at this site.

I also discovered a nice paper toy creator at PaperCritters where you can draw and add features to the different views of your creature then print out the net. Here's the test one I made. Maybe get kids to make a Christmas character.

Day 11: Oh Mathsmas Tree

My sister called me yesterday to give me the news story that mathematicians have worked on the calculations required for the perfect Christmas tree. Best made-up-headline-word ever: Treegonometry.

Not sure if my tree from previous years is going to cut it.

This was the year I made it. I cut into a whole lot of sheets of green (and brown) paper and assembled with lots of blutac and masking tape.

Then we decorated. With origami santas and presents and some other stuff. There's a bauble that says "I love octagons".

I took the tree down piece by piece and reassembled it last year.

This year I'm thinking of going three-dimensional, after seeing this tutorial linked on Pinterest. Drawing up a net for that would be a great maths activity.

After construction, I might refer to that article to calculate the required size for our tree topper. And I'm sure there are more ways to enrich decorating the Mathsmas tree. Maybe some baubles with problems on them to solve before using to decorate. Hmm....

A Shapes Puppet Show

I was browsing through MathsLinks and got a bit of inspiration from this little Sesame Street clip:



I love the little triangle muppet. It made me think that my year 7 class (who are a very creative bunch) could write a little puppet show about shapes, make some puppets, and maybe perform it for some of our local primary school kids.

I decided to make a demo puppet to show them my idea. Here he is:

More about making him on my craft blog, Jupiter Hollow.

The kids are really keen on the idea and we have brainstormed a lot of possibilities, most of which include a lot of puns. I've roped in their music teacher to help with the music side of things, and they have lots of ideas for songs.

We've also started making puppets. For the kids, we started with cardboard and made nets, which we are then going to cover with fabric. Here's one that I did, I call him "Tetrahedron Puppy".

More photos and info to come as the project proceeds.

Net Animals/Characters

Ever since I made Angry Birds with year 10 and put them up at the front of the room, my year 7s have been asking about them.

"Do we get to make Angry Birds?"

"When do we get to make Angry Birds?"

"When are we doing shapes?"

Then, every lesson after starting Shapes...

"Are we making the Angry Birds this lesson?"

So we made Angry Birds. And for homework, they had to take a net home and turn it into an animal or character. Here are a few cute ones:

A pentagonal pyramid echidna (a bit squished):

Some mice:

 

An octahedral fish:

And the amazing SpongeBob Squarepants net:

Angry Birds

I stumbled upon nets that make up into Angry Birds and even though I've never played the game, I was pretty excited. There just isn't enough maths that is cute!

The program for my year 10 class included constructing solids from nets, so I figured it may as well be a bit more fun and interesting. Here are the cute little guys above my whiteboards:

 

I also challenged them to take a blank net and draw their own cute animal design on it. They seemed amused by my stance that the world needs more cute maths.

I was wondering whether I was going too far off course with this idea, and as I thought about it I decided it has a lot of merit. To design on the net something that will look correct when folded up requires a kind of visualisation and spacial reasoning, and even choosing what solid shape will best suit your design idea is significant. So that prepares me for a year 7 lesson for later in the year!