The kids wanted to do an other project using Patterns of the Universe today:
Yes!!
Flipping through the book last night I found a neat page featuring golden rectangles, so I turned that into a little half coloring / half zometool project for this morning.
We started by talking about the picture in the book. The kids were interested in the spiral pattern and my older son remembered a few of the properties of “golden” rectangles:
Next we built a golden spiral on the living room floor using our zometool set. We actually did a similar project about a year ago, so the ideas weren’t totally new:
Fibonacci Spirals and Pentagons with our Zometool Set
I liked hearing their description of how the Fibonacci sequence appear in the shape – it was a nice way to get talking and thinking about math ideas:
While I cleaned up the Zometool pieces the kids colored in Patterns of the Universe. Here are their descriptions of their colorings. Here’s the one from my younger son:
and here’s my older son:
So, a fun little project for kids connecting the Fibonacci numbers to some geometric patterns. It is neat to hear how the kids think about these connections. I really love how the coloring ideas in Patterns of the Universe lead so naturally to fun projects!
Mike's Math Page 