Saturday 24 January 2009

3D Shapes - Polydron

Earlier this week we had fun in Maths making 3D shapes using the Polydron Archimedean Solids set. This can be purchased from here.


The idea of the set is that children can explore the properties of solid shapes by constructing them using framework pieces. Polydron sets are very child friendly and the teacher's guide and instruction sheets are very user friendly.

The children really enjoyed making the shapes and it was interesting to examine the names of shapes to discover their properties, e.g. the cuboctahedron.

After constructing the shapes we experimented with them, adding faces to augment and removing faces to diminish. They enjoyed making snub shapes where solids 'explode' and spaces are filled with triangles.

I'm certain that the children will remember the lessons and the properties of the shapes.

Saturday 17 January 2009

Very short stories

During our study of different fiction genres we read Short! by Kevin Crossley-Holland. We used the story 'Talk About Short' as inspiration for writing our own short stories. The children wrote stories using less than 140 characters and then uploaded them to our school's Twitter page.


I then used Wordle to create a display of the words they used. Lots of fun!