Yesterday we did a fun project connecting arithmetic and geometry:
Connecting Arithmetic and Geometry
While we were talking about the shapes my older son commented that one of the shapes looked like a pyramid. I thought it would be fun to make the shapes look even more like a pyramid and see what the kids thought.
We started by just talking about the shapes – the most interesting thing to me here was how challenging it was for them to compare the volumes of the shapes:
Because they were having a little bit of difficulty with the volumes I spent a little extra time on the idea. Things seemed to clear up a little bit, luckily:
Finally, I thought it would be interesting for the boys to see some of the math I used to create these shapes. Although this section goes on a little longer than I would have liked, I think this is a fun little introduction to functions and scaling even if we don’t define those ideas explicitly:
A fun little project. I think that some of the broad ideas from calculus are within the grasp of kids even if the underlying calculations probably aren’t. It was fun for me that a question from my older son led from us jumping from arithmetic to geometry to calculus 🙂
Mike's Math Page 