Educating Risa

We played a couple games with popsicle (craft) sticks last night. I got the first game idea from a blog post about making shapes (triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) using sticks, but added a little twist of my own to make the game broader.

I began giving each boy 1 stick. “What can you make?” I asked. We quickly found out the answer: not much with only 1 stick! You could make 1 (one), I (capital ‘aye’), or l (lower case ‘ell’). That was about it. I then gave the boys a second stick. “What can you make now?” Here’s some of the possibilities, both letters and numbers:

Note that the final two shapes could also be symbols: the equal sign, or the plus (adding) or times (multiplying) sign.

With three sticks there were even more letters and numbers, and our first shape. Here are some of them:

   

And with four sticks we could make a couple of shapes, and more:

I threw out words like ‘quadrilateral’ and ‘rhombus’, and pointed out that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Gareth decided he’s played enough and wanted to do some drawing, but Daegan was keen add more sticks. We focussed on shapes from here on in.

With five sticks, a pentagon:

At this point we abandoned the paper underneath, as it was sliding around and making it harder than it needed to be to place the sticks in position. I told Daegan that another shape you could make with 5 sticks was a star, and showed him how to do it, using the interior angles of the pentagon as a guide:

With six sticks, Daegan got very excited about hexagons. “I know where we see those in nature! In a beehive!” And he started flapping his arms and buzzing like a bee:

He then opened the nearby cupboard and got out some Crispex cereal, another hexagon. It got gobbled up nanoseconds after I got this shot:

We then played around making shapes inside the hexagon (as we had done with the star in the pentagon), and found this:

Note that as these are all equilateral triangles, we can use this image to prove that the interior angles of a hexagon add up to 720 degrees. (Each angle in the triangle is 60 degrees, as 60 x 3 = 180 degrees, which is the number of degrees in  a triangle. Since two angles from each triangle are used to make the interior angles of the hexagon, and there are 6 triangles, you get 6 x 120 = 720 degrees). I did NOT do this with my seven year old in case you are wondering!

We quickly made a heptagon (7 sides), talking about how you don’t often see that shape anywhere, and moved on to the octagon. Daegan had an idea right away to complete the image:

 

Have fun with this activity; it’s quite flexible and can be adapted to different ages and abilities.