Saw a great new video from James Tanton today about folding a tie. The kids had spent yesterday hiking in New Hampshire and were a little tired, but Tanton’s project made for a perfect little afternoon project.
I’ll present the videos in the order that we did them, so Tanton’s video is the third one below. Showing his video later in the project will also give you a chance to think through the problem without spoilers.
Anyway, here’s how we started -> what do you have to do to fold a tie in half?
I was super happy with how the introductory problem went because at the end of the last video my older son said that he thought folding the tie into thirds would be hard. Well . . . that’s exactly what we are going to try to figure out!
Next we watched Tanton’s video. He talks about both folding ties and sharing candy, but for today at least we are just focused on the tie folding part:
Now we tried to replicate Tanton’s procedure. My 5th grader had a little bit harder of a time understanding the procedure than my 7th grader did, but they both eventually got it.
At the end we talked about why they thought the procedure worked.
So, a super fun project and a really easy one to implement, too. So many potential extensions, too – might be neat to see how kids approached folding into 5 parts after seeing Tanton’s video, for example.
Thanks for another great project, James!
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