Here’s my plan for the K-1 Family Math nights for this year:
For the first project I’m going to borrow Lior Patcher’s idea about the 4-color from this incredible blog post:
Unsolved Problems with the Common Core
I have 30 min for the 3 projects with the kindergartners and an hour with the 1st graders, so I think for the younger kids we’ll just do one coloring sheet. The sheets I’m going to use come from an old post from Richard Green discussing a really neat result about tiling octagons. The result is a pretty deep result from geometry, but with the side benefit of hopefully producing images that young kids will enjoy seeing and coloring with 4 colors. I learned about Green’s post from Patrick Honner about 2 years ago:
Our project using Green’s post is here:
Using a Richard Green Google+ post to talk about geometry with my son
Here are the two images octagon tilings I’ll use in the project.
Next we’ll move on to making bubble shapes with our Zometool set. As I write this, at least, I think I’ll dip the shapes in the bubbles myself. I’m worried that letting a room full of younger kids loose on a container full of bubble solution will end up with bubble solution everywhere. Also the zome parts are small and I won’t be able to supervise all of the kids on my own. Anyway, we’ve done a few zome bubble projects and my kids and the neighborhood kids have really enjoyed them. The shapes are really incredible to see and trying to guess what the bubble shapes will look like is a fun challenge for kids. Here are a couple of our old zome bubble projects:
Trying out 4 dimensional bubbles
Finally, with the kindergartners I’m going to do the paper folding project that we did for our original Family Math. I did the same project with the kindergartners last year and it went reasonably well (assuming that you set your expectations on the “me dealing with 30 6 year olds” setting!). I’ve got the first graders in a week, so I’ve got a bit of time to think through a replacement project to avoid duplicating last year’s work. Here’s the project as we did it in 2011:
Mike's Math Page 