It’s amazing what you can do with coloured card, a bit of fishing line and some old, wire coat-hangers! In case you are wondering about the image below, it shows the ceiling of my classroom. What you can see is a mobile made to show maths students’ work on the topic of ‘calculating the surface area of cuboids’.
Students made the nets for these shapes then measured them and added dimensions. Then students calculated their shape’s surface area and wrote the resultant measure on the outside of the shape. Finally they added a knotted piece of fishing line and built the mobile.
One bonus here was that all the card was the same gauge and therefore weight. This meant that, allowing for over-zealous use of glue-sticks, students could begin to experiment with the idea of balancing various sizes of cuboid. They experimented with short and squat cuboids and long and thin ones, as well as the idea of attempting to keep the surface area static whilst changing the proportions of the shape.
It was a great investigation that combined kinaesthetic, logical and interpersonal learning. Needless-to-say, students had a lot of fun and created a beautiful and unusual maths display in the process.
Sounds fun! Just the perfect fun activity to do during a standards testing period! I think I shall do this next week with the kids. Thanks Andrew!
You are welcome CT
This is great. I can imagine that the kids thought that it was great. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the encouragement, Leila.