After staring at the screen for 20 minutes, it appears that I’m to wiped out from shoveling another foot of snow to write. But, since we did squeeze in another fun Zonohedron project this morning in between shoveling sessions, here’s a brief description.
First, this is a follow up to yesterday’s project from Unit 14 of Zome Geometry:
That project started at the end of the unit (literally the last paragraph). Today we went back to the beginning to talk about symmetry. We built some rhombohedra with 3 and 5 fold symmetry following the ideas in part 4 of section 14.1. Here are my sons describing the shapes that they built (~1 min each):
Older son, 3-fold symmetry:
older son, 5-fold symmetry:
younger son, 3-fold symmetry:
younger son, 5 fold symmetry:
After that, we moved on to section 14.2 to talk about an activity that the book calls “around the world.” The ideas here involve parallel edges of the polyhedra and symmetry. We first looked at the “around the world” activity with the 3 and 5-fold symmetric objects that we’d just built:
Finally, doing the “around the world” activity with the giant 242 sided object that we built yesterday. I think the activity here shows the enthusiasm that kids have for the zome projects better than any other activity that we’ve ever done:
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