Educating Risa

Yesterday the boys and I read the book Grandfather’s Shape Story (Canada) (US) by Brian Sargent, one of the Rookie Read About Math series. In the book, a grandfather tells his granddaughter a story about a man and a special (magical?) rooster, and uses tangram blocks to make pictures to compliment the story as he goes along. We pulled out our box of tangram shapes to play along too.

In the story, the man protects the rooster from the fox, and the rooster then tells him he is a special rooster that can grant wishes. The man thinks of things to wish for, including this teapot:

The book ends by grandfather pushing the tangram pieces to his granddaughter and asking her to decide what to wish for. I did the same with the boys, who enjoyed building their own freeform shapes. You’ll never guess what they’d wish for! Here’s Gareth’s creation:

I asked Gareth what it was, and he told me, in a rather excited tone, “A T Rex! Funny that it doesn’t use the square…” (which you can see in his hand below):

Then Gareth came up with how to incorporate the square into his picture. “I know! I’ll open his mouth, and the square can be a a lawyer!” (Yes, he’s watched Jurassic Park several times—LOL):

Then it was Daegan’s turn to create:

Almost done. Where can I put the other large triangle?:

Daegan added the final piece to the body, and informed me that he had made something called an Echinodon:

Gareth then played with the tangram pieces for a while, and came to get to me show me his “funny wish."  Here’s what I saw:

I asked him what his funny wish was, and he told me “a toilet! See, here’s the lid…” (that’s what he’s pointing to in the pic above.) The kid is quite the comedian, eh?

This turned out to be a fun way to combine math, reading and art…and a bit of social studies (tangrams are Chinese in origin) to boot! If you find another good tangram book, or website, etc.. please pass it along in the comments as the boys are keen to do more.