Educating Risa

We did a couple of ‘math art’ projects this morning. I got the ideas from the book Adding and Subtracting (Math Magic series), by Wendy and David Clemson. More here (Canada) or here (US).

 

I started by making a fact flower for the number 4:

Well, actually, I only made the petals and flower centre; it was the boys’ idea to add the stem and leaves. And I think it quite improved the look of the art of the dining room wall. Daegan made the 7 fact flower (which I figured he would, being 7 years old):

Different numbers require different numbers of petals, so you can get quite a range of flowers in your art garden. You could also add other facts (subtraction, multiplication), or more complex math ideas (e.g., for 4 you could write the symbol for 2-squared, or the square root of 16) on the petals as well. We’ll be adding more math flowers to our garden another day.

Gareth was quite keen on making flowers, but not on the math, so he made a plain red flower (complete with crayoned yellow pollen in the centre), and told me it was actually a bean stalk. He made a little “Jack” as well:

Another idea I have for Gareth with these is to make word family flowers (e.g., ‘–at’ in the centre, and ‘cat’, ‘hat’, ‘rat’, ‘mat’, etc. around on the petals).